Gentle Reader -- You are welcome to peruse my web-based journal. I assure you that my contributions to this medium will be both infrequent and inconsequential. Read on!

MORE RANDOM PIX!
Olivia!
Glamour!
Comedy! posted by Carlton at 7:57 PM

HEE

"No exit strategy" indeed. posted by Carlton at 7:25 PM

CD BUYER BEWARE

This story is the latest word on a situation that I've been following just because I keep stumbling upon articles written about it:

Sony BMG Music Entertainment released details Friday of a virtually unprecedented CD recall program that will allow music buyers to exchange recently purchased CDs with copy protection for new discs and MP3s.

The company is responding to widespread security worries over copy protection technology contained on 52 albums released over the last year. When put in a Windows-based computer's CD player, the discs install antipiracy technology on a hard drive that exposes the PC to the risk of viruses and other hacker attacks.

So yeah -- Sony's response to the collapse of the music industry business model is to attack their consumers. Sony sold millions of CDs -- unmarked, at the same price as their other CDs -- with an embedded spyware program that would install itself on any Windows machine and prevent certain uses of the music files. "Antipiracy," they call it. I read elsewhere that the restrictions involve only being able to copy a song file three times and the file being incompatible with use on an iPod -- just to give you some flava.

[Note to evangelical Mac users: keep it to yourself just this once, OK?]

Apparently this program, called a "rootkit" for anybody out there with more tech knowledge than I have, not only 1) buries itself in Windows so deep that it is almost impossible to remove without wrecking your whole system, but 2) transmits information from your computer back to Sony, and 3) opens up your computer to all kinds of spyware and malware, whatever that is. Sony recently put out out a removal program for the rootkit that evidently does more damage to your system than the rootkit itself.

So Sony's commercial ethics are pretty deficient. They sell you a product that not only doesn't work as well as you should expect, but will damage your other property. They don't warn you of this (I have heard that this was only discovered by some Silicon Valley tech guy putting a new disc in a computer that had special antivirus software that flagged it) or adjust the price.

Yeah they are stupid and short-sighted -- attacking both their paying customers and their artists, who will undoubtedly sell fewer discs as a result of this -- but I don't blame Sony specifically. If this occurred to Sony, then it's also occurred to every other music publisher. You can hope that Sony was a little more clever in their stupidity than the others, but expect more episodes like this in the near future. If they do it with CDs, they'll do it with downloads. They would do it with your ears if they could.

In the meantime, look for the brand you know and trust.
posted by Carlton at 12:05 PM

A DUMB THOUGHT

OK, so I am completely muddle-headed on most issues, and as such I had a misguided thought about the whole Bob Woodward thing.

To recap, without too much detail: Woodward just recently revealed that the name of CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame Wilson was leaked to him by an administration official some time before Scooter Libby leaked the name to Judith Miller. That's significant because Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the case, has stated that Libby was the first known official to have leaked the name.

Some thoughts. Number 3 is the most important and dumb.

1. Just because Fitzgerald has said that Libby was the first known leaker doesn't mean that there having been an earlier leaker has any effect on the case against Libby. After all, Libby is up for lying to investigators and the Grand Jury, and there having been an earlier leaker doesn't change the facts of his (alleged) perjuries and obstructions of justice.

2. Woodward was supposed to be, like, a good guy, right? One of the myriad things to come out of this situation may be Woodward's story as a meditation on the corruptive power of access and fame -- the generally accepted narrative being that Woodward traded much of his journalistic cred in exchange for having his balls washed by people in power. Start out as a muckraking giant-killer of a reporter, end up as a fame-whore sock puppet. We'll see.

3. Everyone is speculating on who the leaker might be. Kevin Drum channels the WSJ:

WOODWARD'S SOURCE....The Wall Street Journal says that all of the following people have either been ruled out as Bob Woodward's source or have denied it:


Dick Cheney ("Isn't believed to have talked to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald since last year, nor has he given a waiver to Mr. Woodward. That removes him as Mr. Woodward's source.")

George Bush
Dan Bartlett
Doug Feith
Carl Ford
George Tenet
John McLaughlin
Colin Powell
Steven Hadley
Condoleezza Rice
John Bolton
Karl Rove
Marc Grossman and Rich Armitage couldn't be reached for comment.

Needless to say, any of these people could be lying. But for what it's worth, they're all now on the record saying it wasn't them.

Many people seem to think that the leaker was Cheney, or Hadley, or Rove. My dumb thought is that, while he appears on this list, not too many people have been talking about the possibility that George himself is the leaker. After all, Bush certainly spoke with Woodward at length and many different times during 2003. Woodward wrote an entire book based on his Bush interviews:

Plan of Attack (2004), about how and why George W. Bush decided to go to war with Iraq, relies primarily on two long interviews with the President, but also features interviews with 75 key White House insiders.

Wouldn't it be funny, don't you think, if this entire Valerie Plame brouhaha was somehow about covering up a mess made by the president himself? It makes a certain amount of sense -- I could see George not quite understanding what you can and can't say to a friend like Bobby Woodward, and members of his staff lining uip to fall on their swords to protect him. When you work at the White House, you pretty much take a pledge to be a suicide bomber if the President needs you to (not even if he asks you to, because he may not ask you, just if he needs you to).

Just thinking.

posted by Carlton at 2:55 PM

THE POOR MAN GETS LETTERS

See link at left:

Jean Schmidt, whose heart-warming recounting of a phone call from a pro-war Colonel Danny Bop drove the Democrats into a tizzy on Friday, has received a letter from this soldier, which she has passed along for us to reprint, which we will, without comment.

As a veteran of Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Panama, and both Iraq Wars, I can say with some authority that Col. Bop is exactly right in his observation that people - like Rep Murtha - who advocate ending wars are cowards. Further, in my experience, this sort of person tends to prance about in frilly underwear in his free time. My point is this: I didn’t leave my limbs scattered all across God’s green Earth like so many Lincoln Logs so I could listen to a big girl’s blouse like Col. Murtha sit there and tell me my sacrifice means nothing! So I praise Rep. Schmidt for her courage in calling a 37-year Marine veteran a big pussy, and I’d like her to know that I’d follow her into a foxhole anywhere. Rrrrrroooowwww!

Nine-Star General A. Paco Ryphal
99 Make-Pretend Plaza
Lollipop Town, USA

Maybe more on this whole Murtha business later. Or maybe not! I'm muddle-headed, after all! posted by Carlton at 2:40 PM

SOMETHING INTERESTING

Congessman Murtha (D-PA) -- who, I'm sorry to say, I had not heard of before today -- has come out with a strong condemnation of the situation in Iraq:

The war in Iraq is not going as advertised. It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion. The American public is way ahead of us. The United States and coalition troops have done all they can in Iraq, but it is time for a change in direction. Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We cannot continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action is not in the best interests of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf Region....

"I said over a year ago, and now the military and the Administration agrees, Iraq can not be won "militarily." I said two years ago, the key to progress in Iraq is to Iraqitize, Internationalize and Energize. I believe the same today. But I have concluded that the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq is impeding this progress.

"Because we in Congress are charged with sending our sons and daughters into battle, it is our responsibility, our obligation, to speak out for them. That's why I am speaking out.

"Our military has done everything that has been asked of them, the U.S. can not accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. It is time to bring them home."

(via Americablog. There's a lot more.)

Apparently, Murtha is an important guy to look to on these matters, being 1) the most prominent of the Democratic hawks, 2) the senior Dem on the Defense Appropriations subcommitee, and 3) a former career Marine -- someone who has clout and credibility when speaking on this topic.

Maybe I'll have something more to say about this later. Who knows? posted by Carlton at 4:14 PM

RANDOM PIX

Can I post without Picasa?
Found art! (aka trash)
Pretty flowers!
An Unidentified Apostle posted by Carlton at 10:42 PM

AT A PLACE WHERE THREE ROADS CONVERGE

My lovely wife and I went to a local bar on Monday where there is good trivia -- the questions usually make sense and are at a very good level of difficulty (not too low, not too high). Our team rocked -- we came in first, and won $100. I feel compelled to state that I did well, personally -- although everyone on the team contributed their bit to lead us on to total victory.

Go team. posted by Carlton at 12:31 PM

REALITY CHECK

It appears that reality has finally caught up with the Bush people -- until now, they have been like a dog tied to a pole with a very long rope. They could have gone anywhere within that limit, but instead they took off running in one misguided direction until it caught them short by the collar and jerked them off their feet.
Bad for them, good for us. ("Us" being America.)

The father of my friend Marcia used to say the following: "No one is useless, because anyone can serve as a bad example." Some part of me thinks that it's a bad thing for the presidency to melt down (as I think this one is about to do) -- bad for the country, in a "what will we tell the children" kind of way. But really I don't believe that, because 1) It is a GOOD thing for us to remember that it matters whom we elect, because the government is not some machine that runs itself, and 2) these people have done enough bad shit that they deserve whatever humiliation and criminal penalties come their way -- and then some.

It is apparently now OK to talk about the end of this term, even though it's three years away. I've seen the word "impeachment" bandied about, but I find that to be very unlikely unless the Dems take Congress back next year. "Resignation" seems much more likely, and much more George W. Bush's style. He got to wear the funny costumes and give speeches for a while, and put all his friends and their college buddies in important-sounding positions -- but it soon got be be too much hard work. George doesn't like hard work -- more than that, he's not used to it, doesn't know what it is.

So, I think if he loses some of his very closest advisors, who have been propping him up all this time and telling him how much fun he had been having, he may very well resign. Cheney won't resign, but I don't see how he could be president, either. MMM -- constitutional crisis! And even if he does resign together with GWB, that leases us with . . . Dennis Hastert? Who is having his own problems with the Jack Abramoff thing? Great!

I realize that I am veering off into David Baldacci territory, here. Still, even the New York Times has said that it's hard to imagine three more years under Bush. It's hard to imagine three more years, it's hard to imagine an impeachment or resignation, it's hard to imagine Cheney being president for even one minute (hello, war with Syria!), it's hard to imagine any of the possible outcomes. That leads me to believe that something very unusual is about to happen.

Stay tuned. posted by Carlton at 11:53 AM

LONG TIME NO SEE ROUNDUP

1. I just read a recap of an exchange between Paul Krugman (Princeton economist and NYT columnist) and Bill O'Reilly (Fox blowhard) from a few years ago. O'Reilly referred to Krugman as a "quasi-socialist." Krugman objected that he was in no way a socialist.

O: I said "quasi."
K: Well, that's a wonderful--then you're a quasi-murderer.

Nice one, Paul.

2. I was talking to my wife the other night as we were both about to fall asleep when the line "these are the pearls that were his eyes" popped into my brain. You probably know where that's from, but I didn't. It's The Waste Land. How long has it been since I read that? A decade? How funny.

3. I still haven't finished my book, although I'm close. As I got near to what I thought was the end, I realised that it needed more materal in several places. I'm hoping to have it done by the end of 2005, though -- so I won't have been writing on it for an entire year. My only goal at this point is for it to be finished. Good or bad -- and I go back and forth. I think there's some good things in there, but the whole project is so misguided that I wonder that I haven't just put the whole thing down the garbage disposal.

That is all. posted by Carlton at 11:40 AM