Posts

I had never heard of the Cheetoh factor, but it is the best analogy for the ongoing amendments to President Bush’s ongoing descriptions of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities” that I’ve encountered.

Rogers Cadenhead sent along a link to this article, which talks about how Royal Canadian Mounted Police raided the home and office of an Ottawa journalist to find out information about a source who had leaked information in the Maher Arar case to the press.

One case I haven’t mentioned at all here is that of Maher Arar. A reader sent me an email about Arar’s case yesterday, and while I’ve known about it for a really long time, I’ve never seen fit to mention it at all. Honestly, I think it’s because my outrage meter has been nearly disabled by being saturated with amazing misdeeds on a daily basis, and because I assumed everybody already knew about it. That said, Arar’s case is still special. Arar is a naturalized Canadian citizen who was born in Syria. Arar was returning from a vacation in Tunisia to his home in Canada, and had the misfortune to have to change planes in America. Airport officials for some reason suspected him of being a terrorist, so they deported him. Not to his home in Canada, or to Tunisia, but to Syria, where he was tortured by Syrian intelligence on our behalf. I’ve been complaining about this practice since October, 2001, and it sure seems like Arar’s case is about as close as you can get to a reductio ad absurdum illustration of why it is utterly sickening. Maher Arar has gotten exhaustive treatment at Obsidian Wings. ...

I’ve been absorbing the saturation coverage of the Iowa caucuses this morning. One thing I can say about the result is that the outcome made me happy. If Dean ends up with the nomination, he’s going to have to fight for it. I think that’s a good thing. John Edwards did far better than people would have suspected a week ago, and I think that’s a good thing as well. I honestly don’t have any insight into what caused the Kerry and Edwards resurgence, but lots of other people seem to think they do. I’m also sad to say that I’m glad that Dick Gephardt is out of the race, and is now for all intents and purposes out of politics. He certainly spent many years serving his party, but I don’t think his leadership in Congress has done much for the Democratic party. ...

Russell Beattie is making me really regret signing a two year contract with Cingular Wireless. He’s getting all sorts of advanced services and I can’t even get my stupid GPRS to work.

I was just reading this article about inaccuracies in a CNet article on the cluster of Apple G5 computers at Virginia Tech, and thinking about my own experience with the media. Lately I’ve been thinking more and more that the media is fundamentally unreliable. Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to read stories in the media about things I know about first hand, usually in the business section. These stories have always contained glaring and fundamental inaccuracies. Further, my experience with feature stories is that the reporter nearly always has a story that they want to tell, and they massage the quotations included to tell that story, rather than constructing a story from the information that they’re given. The overall effect this has had has been to make me less interested in the specific details of just about any story I read, because I believe there’s a good chance they’re simply wrong. ...

I thought I’d post a little bit about my job search, since that’s what’s consuming my thoughts if not my actions most of the time these days. Things seem like they’re less bad now than they were at the beginning of 2002, the last time I found myself looking for a job. The market for contractors seems pretty active, and I’ve had a couple of near misses on full time opportunities. On the whole, though, it seems like the job opportunities are far less interesting than they once were. It doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of entrepreneurship going on right now, at least where I live, and it doesn’t even seem like there are a lot of projects with any ambition in the staffing up phase of things. It also seems like many of the openings around here are state or federal government related. That said, it seems like things really started clicking in general last week. The beginning of the year funk finally seems to be wearing off and I’m talking to more people. On the downside, I haven’t done (or even read) much technical stuff at all lately. I think my mind is taking a break from programming while I’m out of work, because I haven’t accomplished anything, even on personal projects. Update: I’ve really sucked at keeping up with email lately, too, even though I don’t have anything better to do. My apologies. ...

Dave Farber forwarded an email to Interesting People that has more details on why future missions to service the Hubble Space Telescope have been cancelled.

One of the big fears surrounding the announcement of a new mission for the space program was that it would mean the end for many of the old missions of the space program. It looks like that shoe has already dropped – I just learned that NASA is mothballing the Hubble Space Telescope. Bad news for space geeks and completely absurd.

I finally got around to viewing the winner of MoveOn.org’s Bush in 30 Seconds contest. Amazing stuff. The winner is a head and shoulders above the runner up.