born live love die

Vice President Cheney is known as Big Time for his rejoinder to Bush while campaigning. Bush, not knowing that his words were being heard, called a reporter and ass hole. Cheney responded, “Big time.”

Cheney is the main architect for the war in Iraq. He is the one who thought that it was unfinished business. Cheney, who had other priorities during Vietnam, has no problem sending the sons and daughters of other people to fight and die. The New York Times has a story about the children of soldiers who are trying to gets some closure on their grief.

And Jacob, who wants to be a soldier, remembers his father saying that he had to go off and fight. “But he didn’t like my mom crying,” Jacob said. “She always cried when he left because she didn’t want him to die.

Where is Big Time now?

When I was a soldier, I learned a many sayings. One I liked was “Don’t let your alligator mouth overload your hummingbird ass.” This was delivered when someone was in danger of stepping over the appropriate line. Like cats who often hiss and growl as a way of avoiding confrontations where someone could get hurt, we developed sayings that could be used to inform a subordinate that they were in danger of insubordination. Another one, less dire in tone was “Someone is going to mess around and get their feelings hurt.” This is equivalent to a cat stare down.

I was thinking about these sayings when I read in the Washington Post, about Bush’s graduation address at West Point.

“This is only the beginning,” Bush said. “The message has spread from Damascus to Tehran that the future belongs to freedom — and we will not rest until the promise of liberty reaches every people in every nation.”

Another saying we had that a warning that fighting was about to occur was, “Don’t let your mouth write checks you ass can’t cash.” Bush’s mouth has written a lot of checks his ass couldn’t cash. The cashing part has been done by the thousands of dead and wounded.

Over at High Performance Computing, they are reporting on how well the Cell processor will perform scientific work.

“Overall results demonstrate the tremendous potential of the Cell architecture for scientific computations in terms of both raw performance and power efficiency,” the authors wrote. While their current analysis uses hand-optimized code on a set of small scientific kernels, the results are striking. On average, Cell is eight times faster and at least eight times more power efficient than current Opteron and Itanium processors, despite the fact that Cell’s peak double precision performance is fourteen times slower than its peak single precision performance. If Cell were to include at least one fully utilizable pipelined double precision floating point unit, as proposed in their Cell implementation, these speedups would easily double.

There is a paper with some interesting data: in 2D FFTs, the Cell processor is 41 times more power efficient than the IA64 architecture.

The New York Times Sunday Magazine has a great article about National Guardsmen who deployed to Iraq and their homecoming. This graph caught my eye:

For Morgain, the steadily mounting number of attacks on Alpha Company began to harden his views on the war. As a Humvee gunner, he occupied the most dangerous position on the vehicle, but it was also the one that allowed the most face-to-face contact with ordinary Iraqi civilians, and this provided him with a unique window onto the baffling complexity of the place. At first, he enjoyed clowning with the children who would crowd around his Humvee, but as the months passed and tension mounted in the area, he recognized some of those same children among the ones now throwing bricks and pipes at him. On one occasion, he distributed shampoo to a group of grateful women in a village outside Tikrit; returning a few days later, he discovered that the women had been beaten by their husbands for accepting gifts from the Americans.

Norris, too, had come to understand that his presence was not appreciated, or worse. His officers, he told me, “were always drumming into us: ‘Hearts-and-minds, hearts-and-minds. We’ve got to win these people over.”‘ He gave a laugh. “These people just wanted us dead.”

One fo these men died. Read the whole thing.

Political hack Brett Kavanaugh was approved to sit on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. This is also known as the “Little Supreme Court”. The Washington Post said:

Kavanaugh had been praised by Republicans but opposed by Democrats who briefly threatened to filibuster his nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He was opposed by Maryland Democrats Paul S. Sarbanes and Barbara A. Mikulski and approved by Virginia Republicans John W. Warner and George Allen.

Critics said the White House staff secretary’s record spoke of loyalty to Bush but was thin on courtroom experience.

What is missing from the article is that ABA downgraded their rating of Kavanaugh from “well qualified” to “qualified”. Note well that “thin on courtroom experience” is actually “never tried a case.”

Republicans have two goals: the end of taxes on income from capital, and stacking the appeals courts with ideological judges.

Dan Froomkin writes in the Washington Post about President Bush’s words or contrition. Or not.

Reading and watching the coverage of President Bush’s joint news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair last night, you could be forgiven for concluding that Bush had suddenly started acknowledging the error of his ways.

But you would be wrong.

I think he has a point.

Bush expressed regrets last night for some of the cowboy rhetoric of his first term, and he acknowledged that the horrific prison abuse at Abu Ghraib was a big mistake.

But he wasn’t really conceding much. In the former case, he was expressing regret about style, not substance; and in the latter case, the only harm he acknowledged was to America’s reputation — while taking no responsibility for any role he might have had in creating the conditions in which such atrocities could take place.

Froomkin is right. This is an apology of the type: “Gee, I’m sorry that happened to you” when the person speaking in the first person is the one responsible for the results for which sorrow is being expressed. “Gee, too bad Iraq is all messed up.” “Gee, too bad more Iraqis got tortured at Abu Grahib.” “Gee, too bad”.

What is really amazing, even for a reported former drunk like Bush, is that he doesn’t avail himself of the the willingness of the American people to forgive. If Bush got Cheney to resign right now, fired Rumsfeld, went before the American people and said: “I did it. I’m sorry. I was acting on the advice of people I trusted and they had their own agenda. We are embroiled in a mess in Iraq and I hope you will forgive me and I hope the Iraqi people will forgive us for putting them through this. If you want me to do so, I will resign and so we can get a government that is not the problem, it is the solution.”, and the American people would give him an 80% approval rating.

But he won’t do it.

Desmond Dekker has passed.

In 1969, he enjoyed his biggest success with the propulsive reggae classic “Israelites,” four years before Marley truly brought reggae into the mainstream. The song’s hard-luck lyrics — “Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir” — delivered in Dekker’s mellifluous voice, resonated around the world. It topped the charts in the U.K. and many other countries, and reached the top 10 in the United States.

“It’s about how hard things were for a lot of people in Jamaica — downtrodden, like the Israelites that led Moses to the Promised Land,” Dekker said in the liner notes for the 2005 career retrospective “You Can Get It If You Really Want.”

“I was really saying, don’t give up, things will get better if you just hold out long enough.”

Amen.

NASA has a new web page for kids. Check it out: NASA Kids’ Club Home Page

There is the Iraq of fiction, the fiction written by the Bush team and parroted on Fox News and other right leaning media organs. And then there is the Iraq of fact, as written about by Benjamin Wallace-Wells in The New Yorker.

At the SITE office, Katz showed me some suicide-bombing videos from Iraq. They are often five or ten minutes long, overlaid with religious chanting. In one video, a middle-aged Iraqi doctor straps on a suicide vest. “In Israel, they always told you that the profile of a suicide bomber was someone young, without family, from the lowest economic level, but what we see here over and over is just the opposite,” Katz said.

Just the opposite.

Yes it is. Just the opposite. Opposite of what the Bush team has been saying since before they dragged our Republic into this mess.

The article is about Rita Katz, and her self-funded anti-terrorism work. Read the whole thing.

David Leonhardt, writing in the New York Times starts off with:

HERE is a political Rorschach test for this midterm election year. What’s your reaction to the following:

These are the best of times in many ways. Americans are wealthier than previous generations, they are healthier and they enjoy a higher standard of living. The good old days simply weren’t as good as the present day.

Close, but no cigar. Mr. Leonhardt accepts this statement as fact, when while perhaps factual, hides the truth about the distribution of wages. Wage and earnings gains are happening at the upper end of the distribution, but are not happening at the middle and lower end of the distribution.

He gets to the truth a little later, but only to bash Democrats for telling the truth.

Yet many Democratic politicians just don’t seem comfortable talking about the ways that overall living standards have risen, focusing instead on the recent stagnation in wages for rank-and-file workers.

Since rank-and-file workers make up a broad slice of the polity, yes, Democrats should focus on the fact that they are getting left behind by the changes Mr. Leonhardt wants to trumpet.

Mr. Leonhardt should also focus on them, as stratification is not in the best long term interest of our society.