Author: geoff

The life of Iraqis who work in the Green Zone

A grim account relayed by Guardian blogger Brian Whitaker:

Just a few days before the president’s visit, Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan-born US ambassador in Baghdad, sent a disconcerting cable to the state department in Washington. Headed “sensitive”, it painted a grim picture of life in “free and democratic Iraq” as viewed through the eyes of the nine Iraqi employees in the embassy’s public affairs press office.
[…]
“Some of our staff do not take home their American cell phones, as this makes them a target. Planning for their own possible abduction, they use code names for friends and colleagues and contacts entered into Iraq cell phones. For at least six months, we have not been able to use any local staff members for translation at on-camera press events. More recently, we have begun shredding documents printed out that show local staff surnames. In March, a few staff members approached us to ask what provisions would we make for them if we evacuate.“

UPDATE:Full text here.

An Inconvenient Truth

On the hottest day of the year so far in the Boston area (over 94 in Waltham, MA), the fellowship went to see Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Our verdict: four enthusiastic thumbs up. The critics are right, this is an outstanding movie. As Roger Ebert put it:

When I said I was going to a press screening of “An Inconvenient Truth,” a friend said, “Al Gore talking about the environment! Bor…ing!” This is not a boring film. The director, Davis Guggenheim, uses words, images and Gore’s concise litany of facts to build a film that is fascinating and relentless. In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to.

If you haven’t seen the film, please do so. If you can’t, consider buying the book, or borrowing it from your local public library.
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(And yes, after watching this movie I deeply regret that I didn’t buy the Prius. Oh, well. I hope my future choices will be wiser.)

Flamboyant

Since my copy of the new Pet Shop Boys album Fundamental arrived from amazon.co.uk, I’ve been listening to nothing else. It’s easily the best work they’ve done in the last ten years. If you buy a copy, be sure to get the de luxe version with the bonus CD, Fundamentalism. In addition to different mixes of some tracks from Fundamental, this includes a couple of original gems. Check out this video for “Flamboyant”. It reminds me of watching TV at 4am in a Japanese hotel, unable to sleep because of jet lag and completely incapable of understanding what’s the TV program is all about…. (“Lost In Translation” got it exactly right.)
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[I wish the “blog video” feature of YouTube understood WordPress….]

82 minutes of frustration, and then magic

The England vs. Trinidad & Tobago match just ended. For the first 82 minutes it was horribly frustrating to watch: England had possession two-thirds of the time, but were incapable of putting the ball where it needed to go… in the net. And then Rooney came on and inspired everyone, and Beckham put in the perfect cross, and Crouch kept his eye on the ball for the first time in the match. 1-0. And at the 90th minute, Gerrard pulled off a beautiful, lightning-quick, feint right, lunge left, shoot sequence to make it 2-0. Delightful. Just don’t leave it so late next time – OK?

Being An Oxymoron

A breath of fresh air from liberal evangelical Tony Campolo

I’m one of those pro-life Christians who is convinced that the outrageous number of abortions each year are more due to right-wing economic policies than to Roe v. Wade. In a society where many poor women must work outside the home at a ridiculously low minimum wage just to survive, yet have no access to daycare for their children, we should not be surprised if they seek abortion when faced with an unplanned pregnancy. Yet many of the Religious Right Christians who share my pro-life sentiments tend to oppose enacting legislation that would enable poor women to give birth and keep their children. No wonder one of our critics says, “Evangelicals are people who believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth.” Too often it seems like we care about protecting the unborn, but we’re not willing to provide for the born.

The reinvention of Jini proceeds apace

Rob Gingell once observed that “those who do not use Jini are doomed to reinvent it.” Today Warren brings us up to date on the way this reinvention is happening in the WS-splat world:

How deliciously ironic that the WS architects are (badly) re-inventing executable bytecode (BPEL), types (XSD) and interface centric service development (SCA).

I’ll reserve judgment on his “(badly)” evaluation, and simply note that I can remember a conversation with one of the people involved in SCA in which we were lamenting the fact that software engineers are notoriously ignorant about the history of their discipline….

Swiftian satire

Jonathan Swift was the most brilliant satirist of the 18th century. From the outrageous “A Modest Proposal” to the subtle delights of “Gulliver’s Travels”, he demonstrated that the stiletto of satire could be more effective than the bludgeon of outrage. And now the blogosphere has its own Jonathan Swift. Here’s a sample of his work, from Ann Coulter Tackles the Menace of Widows and Grieving Mothers:

Coulter is understandably frustrated at how the liberal media fawns over these women and hangs on their every word, while she has struggled to get her message out through the occasional television appearance, talk radio, college campus tours, her syndicated column, her website and her bestselling books. The media seems to believe that these women deserve some sort of special status just because they happen to have lost a loved one, even though they lack Coulter’s long list of credentials. These narcissistic women persist in believing that their loss was somehow greater than that of the rest of the country who watched it all happen on television.

Brilliant. And then there’s the case of the suicides at Guantanamo:

Admiral Harris contends ominously that the suicides are in fact an act of war against the United States. “I believe this was not an act of desperation, but rather an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us,” Harris said. Asymmetrical warfare is a tactic used by a weaker enemy to surprise and disorient his opponent. In order to restore symmetry to the battle, our side will have to engage in increasingly self-destructive tactics of our own and abandon certain principles and ethical values that hold us back and hand our opponents weak points they can exploit to strike back at us, a strategy we are already using with some success in Iraq.

Scoble on Jonathan, and laid-off bloggers

Legendary Microsoft blogger Scoble (soon to be ex-MS) recently visited Jonathan Schwartz at Sun. His account of their conversation is well worth reading. I found the following comment about the impending layoff particularly interesting:

For one, Sun is going to encourage all the laid off workers to continue to blog — on Sun’s dime. Now, I can imagine the kind of vitriol and crud that’ll get posted by workers who’ve just lost their jobs. That takes real corporate bravery and my hat is off to him. One good thing about this? It’ll make it possible for new employers to get in touch with laid off workers. There’s a lot of companies that are hungry for workers right now.

So does this apply to recently-laid-off Sun bloggers: will their blogs.sun.com accounts will be unfrozen? Can I get geoffarnold.com added back to b.s.c/planet.do? (At least until I land a new gig.)
And I guess they’ll have to change the b.s.c title, which currently reads:
This space is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything.

Random 10

It’s Sunday morning, and the British Grand Prix finished a little while ago. However here in the USA it’s being televised tape-delayed on one of the major networks at 1pm EDT, so I’m trying to avoid all sources of news. Let’s see what iTunes has for us:

  • “Alone Again With The Dawn Coming Up” by the KLF (from Chill Out) personal favourite
  • “Astrid + Rope And Glory” by the Legendary Pink Dots (from The Tower)
  • “Back Side Of The Moon” by the Orb (from Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld) personal favourite
  • “Falling Farther In” by October Project (from Falling Farther In) personal favourite
  • “Five A.M. in the Pinewoods”, a poem by Mary Oliver (from At Blackwater Pond)
  • “Genie On A Table Top” by Al Stewart (from Famous Last Words)
  • “Good Times Bad Times” by Led Zeppelin (from Led Zeppelin Remasters)
  • “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” by Johnny Cash (from American IV: The Man Comes Around)
  • “In My Dreams” by Crosby, Stills & Nash (from The Greatest Hits)
  • “Overture” by The Who (from Live At Leeds – Deluxe Edition)

I just noticed that Susie’s sunday morning shuffle includes “When Fall Comes to New England” by Cheryl Wheeler. I haven’t got around to ripping any of our Cheryl Wheeler collection – what an omission!

The value of reading

There’s a mind-blowing piece over at present simple: the kind of thing that makes you wonder what planet you’re on. The author (a lecturer language instructor) was talking to a group of students about reading:

I asked the other three students (there were only four) how much reading they did. All three of them said that they didn’t read books at all. Ever. They didn’t seem ashamed to admit this, even though they are all university students in their third or fourth years. They don’t even read textbooks. I asked. They said they didn’t need to, to pass their courses, and since they found reading hard work and didn’t enjoy it, what was the point?
Then one of them looked thoughtful. “Do you think reading is good for anything?” he asked. “Do you think people should read?”
He really wanted to know.
How do you answer questions like that?

I don’t know. How do you? (My emphasis, in case it matters.)