Posts

Jack Shafer wrote a Slate piece today that outdoes all the weblog entries I’ve read on bringing the world up to date on l’affair de Valerie Plame. He also suspects that not much will come of it, in the end.

Phil Carter has an interesting post that describes how our invasion of Iraq may have aided al-Qaeda in several ways. First, by alienating foreign governments that could be helping us shut down al-Qaeda’s financial and logistical networks, and second by increasing passive support for the organization and providing them with a new crucible in which terrorists are forged (taking the place of Afghanistan under Soviet occupation).

John Schwartz in the New York Times: The Level of Discourse Continues to Slide, a discussion of the PowerPoint culture. The problem isn’t the tool, it’s the presenters. In college, I attended scads of boring lectures with bad overhead slides. PowerPoint has just made creating bad presentations accessible to everyone. One trend that I really do find disturbing is the increasing use of PowerPoint at all levels of education. The idea that students in junior high are writing reports in PowerPoint makes me a bit ill. That said, taking PowerPoint away wouldn’t solve anything. You’d just go to meetings and listen to boring presentations that included even worse visual aids than the awful PowerPoint slides that we put up with these days. Update: Don Box has some tips on giving a technical presentation. ...

Juan Cole reports this morning that the United States (as the occupying power in Iraq) is now legally responsible for paying reparations to Kuwait for Iraq’s invasion in 1990. Paul Bremer has asked Kuwait’s government to suspend the reparations, but they have refused. There’s probably more to the story, but that looks like serious ingratitude to me. We got Kuwait out from under Saddam’s thumb in 1990, and then in 2003 we made sure that his regime would never threaten Kuwait again (Saddam wasn’t much of a threat to us, but he was always a threat to Kuwait), and they’re leaving us on the hook for the reparations? What’s going on here? Cole also adds some depressing context to the Iraq poll numbers that were much discussed last week. Apparently the results of the polling are not as rosy as most of the people citing the poll would have you believe. ...

Much like the Trent Lott story, which went dormant for awhile after being initially reported and then exploded, the administration leak of Valerie Plame’s identity as an undercover CIA agent is becoming big news after going away for a month or so. The Washington Post has gotten an unnamed “senior administration official” to acknowledge that two other “senior White House officials” leaked her identity to six journalists in order to discredit her husband, Robert Wilson, who had torn down the “uranium from Niger” bit in the State of the Union address. If the Justice Department follows up, then we could see some grand jury action in the relatively near future. I’ll admit to some schadenfreude here, but let’s face it, giving up the identities of undercover CIA agents in order to score political points is repugnant. ...

John Udell has the king of all posts on the Dan Geer dust up, the present monoculture in desktop computing, and related matters.

I honestly have no idea whether George W Bush is going to be elected to another term, but I have some extremely anecdotal evidence that tells me that he may not. You may or may not know that I grew up in a small, ordinary town in Texas. I’ve been working on my parents for about three and a half years now to see Bush as I see him, the obstacle being that they are pretty dyed in the wool Republicans who voted for Bush twice for governor. About 6 or 8 months ago, they got fed up with this mad rush to war with Iraq and said flat out that they wouldn’t vote for him again. (I’ll be surprised if they vote for any Republicans in the next election thanks to the whole redistricting debacle and Prop 12.) Last night my mom told me that one of my aunts asked her flat out, “What are we going to do about Bush.” This is a person who I could never in my wildest dreams imagine voting against Bush. She’s a social conservative and lifelong Republican from a family of lifelong Republicans who loves America in the “God Bless America” sense. President Bush has lost her vote and support on the virtues of his behavior as President. If Bush is driving away people like my aunt, he’s done. ...

Christopher Hitchens is well known for his iconoclastic obituaries of popular public figures, so when I clicked on the link to his obituary of Edward Said, I expected something the lines of his demolitions of Mother Theresa or Princess Diana. Instead, I read something quite different.

Following up on a link from yesterday, Dan Geer says he was forced out as CTO of @Stake for signing onto the report critical of Microsoft that I mentioned.

Remember when I said you ought to keep an eye on a Google News search for Valerie Plame’s name? Looks like that search is about to start yielding new results.