Author: geoff

Audioscrobbler

I’ve started using an interesting web service called Audioscrobbler to publish information on the music I’m listening to. It works like this. You install a software agent (plugin) that knows how to interrogate your preferred digital music player to find out what’s playing. In my case, that means running the plugin for iTunes on Mac OSX, but most popular software is supported. Periodically the plugin uploads the list of tracks you’ve played to the audioscrobbler server, which builds a page for each user (here’s mine) showing what they’ve listened to recently, plus a bunch of statistics. (If you’re off the net, the plugin caches the information until you reconnect.) The server also calculates affinity groups, and shows you recommendations based on what other people who like the same music you do are listening to.

But this is a security risk, isn’t it? After all, who knows what information the plugin might be sucking off your system? Well, actually, I know! All of the plugins are open source, and I was able to read through the source code for the plugin to verify its behaviour before I installed it. And although this isn’t proof of good intentions, the raw data is available under a Creative Commons license. In fact a colleague of mine is using the data in a research project.

So now you can see what I’m listening to, on my Mac or on my iPod. One warning: I’m having iTunes play through some of my favourite material each night, just to load a statistically meaningful dataset. So if it looks as if I’m listening to stuff when I ought to be sleeping, relax. Anyway, right now it’s working through my Captain Beefheart collection: it’s up to “Safe As Milk” on Strictly Personal. An awesome track….

How the British bombers slipped through the net: Bush admin incompetence?

AMERICAblog has a lengthy piece about how the British attempted to prevent an Al Qaeda bomb plot against London, and why they failed:

“ABC News just reported that the British authorities say they have evidence that the London attacks last week were an operation planned by Al Qaeda for the last two years. This was an operation the Brits thought they caught and stopped in time, but they were wrong. The piece of the puzzle ABC missed is that this is an operation the Bush administration helped botch last year.”

This is essential – and infuriating – reading. It’s well documented, not conspiracy theory stuff. The Bush team inadvertantly* caused the name of a “mole” in Al Qaeda to become public, and…

“The appearance of Khan’s name in the New York Times on August 2 caused the British to have to swoop down on the London al-Qaeda cell to which he was speaking. As it was, 5 of them heard about Khan’s arrest and immediately fled. The British got 13, but it was early in their investigation and they had to let 5 go or charge them with minor offences”.

And the British authorities have now connected this group with last week’s bombing.

—
* Let’s be charitable.

Uncomfortable truths

slacktivist went to see Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, and was intrigued to find that many conservative pundits are interpreting it as an anti-American diatribe. But as he points out, H. G. Wells wrote the original novel as a commentary on the colonialism of his day. He was trying to get his readers to understand what it might have been like for aboriginal peoples to be confronted by the overwhelming and inexorable fire-power of Britain and the other European powers.

“These conservative film critic wannabes want a story to follow the moral outline of the old comics code or of Job’s foolish friend Bildad. They want the good guys to be rewarded for their virtue and the bad guys to be punished for their vice. But Wells’ story isn’t about morality, it’s about power. His Martian invaders have bigger, better weapons so they win and we lose. Period.

This, I think, is what the rightwing critics find most threatening in Wells’ story and Spielberg’s film. It vividly illustrates that might and right are not the same thing, that military superiority is not evidence of superior virtue. If the illustration of such a basic truth can now be interpreted as an ‘anti-American’ political statement, that is neither Wells’ nor Spielberg’s fault.”

How quickly they forget

Sully admits, grudgingly, “Many reasonable people argue that the Iraq invasion made matters worse, not better in the short term. Let’s concede that, for the sake of argument. But deep down, how do we drain the swamp of Islamo-fascism?” How about the way that many of us proposed back in 2002-2003 while Sully was infatuated with Baghdad? Afghanistan and Palestine. Nail al-Qaeda and the Taliban, for which we had worldwide support, and really rebuild Afghanistan (thus demonstrating that we were serious about this not being a crusade). Meanwhile pull a Bush I on Israel and force through a real solution to the West Bank and Gaza. With all of that going on, it’s really doubtful that Saddam would have held out for more than a year or two….

And why on earth does Sully raise the spectre of Saddam helping al-Qaeda? Has he learned nothing? Is his argument so weak that he has to grasp at such totally discredited straws?

Of coure all of this is purely hypothetical, and presumes a basic competence in policy execution which is obviously absent in Bush’s team of bozos. In hindsight, since they were going to screw things up whatever they did, it would have been better if they’d done as little as possible to exacerbate the situation.

Cardinal Schönborn channeling ID

Over at Body and Soul there’s an interesting piece about the background to Cardinal Schönborn’s recent op-ed in the NYT “clarifying” the Roman Catholic position on evolution. Not only does it seem that the red-hatted one was working from an outline prepared by the creationist Discovery Institute, but: “The cardinal’s essay was submitted to The Times by a Virginia public relations firm, Creative Response Concepts, which also represents the Discovery Institute.”

Now why would the former Count Christoph Maria Michael Hugo Damian Peter Adalbert von Schönborn require the services of a PR firm in Virginia?

(Via Suburban Guerilla.)

UPDATE: It turns out that Creative Response Concepts has an interesting notorious history. They became (in)famous as the PR firm responsible for packaging the Swift Boat Veterans’ libel The principals include Greg Mueller and Mike Russell, formerly communications directors for Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson respectively. They’ve been caught out trying to feed stories into the blogosphere as part of their PR work on behalf of various right-wing groups, to the extent that they actually had to (vaguely) apologize for it.

Standing together? It's not what you think

Americans have been falling over themselves to spin the London bombings into arguments for Bush’s policies; to couple 9/11 with 7/7 and present America and Britain as joined at the hip. Here’s Bush: “Just as America and Great Britain stood together to defeat the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century, we now stand together against the murderous ideologies of the 21st century.” But apparently “standing together” is for politicians, not the military. Yahoo! reports:

All 12,000 members of the U.S. Air Force stationed in Britain have been banned from visiting London because of last week’s bombings…. A U.S. spokeswoman was quoted as saying that military staff were not allowed to go anywhere inside the M25 orbital motorway belt surrounding the capital until further notice, “because the security of our people is our top concern.”

“Family members who are U.S. civilians and are not subject to orders are also being encouraged to stay away from London,” the spokeswoman, Cindy Dorfner, was quoted as saying.

The response of the British media was appropriately caustic. The Daily Mail said it best: “It was business as usual in brave and resilient London yesterday — though not if you were a member of the world’s most powerful military machine.”

I wonder how New Yorkers would have reacted if, after 9/11, the U.S. Air Force had banned all visits to the Big Apple because it was too dangerous. They have a legendary capacity for invective; I imagine that “chickenhawk” would have been the least of the epithets…

UPDATE: According to the Guardian, the ban has now been lifted – but not before it had disrupted U.S. participation in various ceremonies commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of World War 2.

Some of the most incredulous comments came from Thomas Conlon, the UK director of American Citizens Abroad:

“These same people who are being restricted from London are being flown into Baghdad,” he said. “If they’re going into Baghdad, I can’t imagine why they aren’t allowed to go into London.”

He said he estimated that around 80% of Britain’s 250,000 expat Americans lived in London. “I’m surprised at the military that they would do this,” he added. “If you go to the city, the American expats are all back at work now.”

Indeed. But they’re doing really important stuff, like making money. Any comments from the Pentagon about this stupid decision?

60 laps of unremitting concentration

Watching the British Grand Prix this morning, I was trying to imagine what it would be like to spend nearly an hour and a half at an average speed of 135 MPH, at the limits of adhesion, with no opportunity to relax. Even pit stops don’t offer a break – witness the way that Fisichella threw away points in both the French and British Grands Prix by stalling in the pits. Anyway, Montoya executed flawlessly today to beat Alonso; Raikkonen was third, but only because he was moved 10 places down the grid because of an engine change. Without that, it would have been a McLaren 1-2.

As David Hobbs just reminded us, the British Grand Prix is perpetually under threat from the Formula One organizers. This makes no sense: for most teams it’s the “home race” (even the Renault team is based in England), and the event always attracts a huge, knowledgeable, and enthusiastic crowd.

And Michael Schumacher, who completely dominated the 2004 season? The only time the camera picked him out was to show how he was holding up Raikkonen’s progress towards the front. Other than that, he was curiously irrelevant, finishing 6th.

On American coverage of London

I like astute observers like James Wolcott who have the knack of capturing an idea that has been hovering on the edge of my consciousness and hauling it out into the spotlight. Case in point, apropos of the US coverage on London in the aftermath of Thursday’s terrorist attack:

“The curious thing is that so many of the rightward bloggers and Fox Newswers who are hailing the Brits for their quiet stoicism and pluck don’t seem to realize they’re issuing an implicit rebuke to themselves and their fellow Americans. They’re saying, in effect, ‘You’ve got to admire the Brits for showing calm and quiet perserverence after these explosions–they don’t get all hysterical, overdramatic, and overreactive the way we Americans do.’ They don’t seem to realize the example shown by Londoners might be a lesson to them, a model they might follow instead of playing laptop Pattons at full volume every time they feel a rousing post coming on.”