I just got back from seeing The Manchurian Candidate, which was quite enjoyable, if not the classic its predecessor was. And I realized that I actually saw parts of this movie as it was production. In October 2003 I took a group of friends to New York City for Fall Break. The trip was actually really emotionally intense for personal reasons, which is probably why I remember that when we went to Times Square, there was this ground level office decked out like a campaign headquarters for someone named "Arthur Shaw". I'm thinking to myself at the time, "That's funny. There isn't anyone named Shaw running for President as far as I know, even among the Nine Dwarves (yes, there were nine of them then). This must be a local election. But what local politician has the kind of money to rent office space on the ground floor in Times Square? And why is the place deserted if they're in the middle of a campaign?" It turns out I was right to think it was strange, for I learned tonight that I stumbled across the campaign headquarters for the Benjamin K. Arthur/Raymond Prentiss Shaw campaign.
Oh, and you should go see the movie. It's a lot of fun. They manage to stay delightfully nonpartisan in their politics. Senator Shaw's party uses rhetoric that is significantly Republican in its bent, but she says that her party will take the Northeast and California yet get crushed in the South, Midwest, and Southwest. They also manage to update the political landscape quite well, to the point that not only does the government's left hand not know what the right hand is doing, but a lot of the time the right hand has a pretty vague idea too. There are also a couple of really nice points where they build up events like the original does, but then have the action do something different at the last minute. They also cut out a lot of the Freudian bullshit that makes the original a little silly in places for a 21st century viewer.
Still, this kind of thing is also the movie's biggest flaw. In trying to stay unentangled from the current political landscape - something the original most decidedly engaged - it makes the villains pretty nebulous. In the 1950s, there were enemies out there who had the resources and motivation to try and pull something like this off. Today, there are people who would like to, but they haven't the resources (Arabs, etc.) and people with the resources who have no interest (China, Russia, Wal-Mart, etc.). There isn't any need for some global megacorp to "put a sleeper in the White House". They can do that in plain sight.
In keeping with Josiah's post about the bootlegs available from the Wilco show on 6/6 in Pittsburgh, I learned today that Wilco has announced a series of tour dates for the fall. The list is available here. For those of you in Chattanooga, note that they're planning to do back-to-back shows in Nashville and Atlanta. Get on that. I myself will be buying a ticket for the Radio City Music Hall show in October as soon as they're available.
Q: What's the fastest way of moving 5 terabytes of data daily from Santa Cruz to Los Angeles?
A: FedEx.
So the Druge Report Archives have got the transcript of the Bill O'Reilly/Michael Moore interview. Like I said, I don't have any respect for either of these people, but I have to say that Bill comes out of this one looking pretty good, if more than a bit petulant. Moore is, and continues to be, a complete asshole. It's an entertaining read, if nothing else.
Today I made a day trip to NYC where I put my name in on an awesome little apartment on the corner of W. 115th St. and Manhattan Ave. Today I fax over an entirely bogus amount of documents to finalize the lease. As I'm a student and am not currently making 40x rent, I need a guarantor. This will be my dad. If his tax returns, bank statements, and last few pay stubs didn't show that he is making more than 80x rent, he would need to send a letter from a CPA indicating that he does make 40x rent and is financially stable.
From the map, it looks as if I'm only two blocks from school, literally a walk in the park. Well, kind of. It is true that Columbia is just across Morningside Park from my apartment, but it's also true that it's a good eight or so story climb up the escarpment to get there. Most of the walkways in the park are steps. If I wanted to bike, I'd have to go south to 110th, then west to Amsterdam, and from there up the hill to school.
The apartment itself is pretty small, but oddly enough only a little smaller than the apartment I was in in Chattanooga. It's only one room, which limits the number of things you can do with the space, but that room is probably 10x17. It's got its own bathroom which is considerably larger than my previous digs. Its also got water that is actually really hot, which will be a nice change. However, the place only has one window, and that looks out at the little courtyard through which you enter the building. Scenic it ain't, and there won't be much of a breeze. It's also on the ground floor, which isn't exactly ideal. Sure, it's easy to get in and out, but that means it's easy for people I don't necessarily want visiting me to get in and out. I'm about 10 blocks from the center of Harlem.
So I guess this is for real then. I've got an apartment in Manhattan.
The following is the full-text of an article published in today's Wall Street Journal about the hot-off-the-presses report from the 9/11 Commission. The article can be found here, but registration is required, so I've copied it below. For those of you who can't be bothered to read the whole thing, know this: the report praises the Patriot Act as being a necessary adjustment to our legal system if further attacks are to be prevented, states that the nastiness in Iraq and Iran was not nearly as minimal as major media portals would have you believe, and asserts that first-strike tactics are going to be necessary to head off further Islamist murderers.
And for all those of you who think that our government could have prevented 9/11, that pre-emptive foreign policy is evil, and that the Patriot Act is the worst thing ever, I have this to say: Suck it, Trebek. Suck it long, and suck it hard.
The Pre-emption Commission
The virtues of the Patriot Act, among other surprises.
Friday, July 23, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
So the doctrine of pre-emption has its uses, after all. In a world of conflicting intelligence, uncertain consequences and potential foreign opposition, it is still sometimes necessary for America to attack an adversary before it attacks us.
That, reduced to its essence, is the main conclusion of yesterday's 567-page report from the 9/11 Commission. The September 11 attacks may have been a shock, it says, but they never should have come as a surprise. Our government--and the entire political class--knew enough to act against al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, but it did not because of "failures of imagination, policy, capability, and management." Though the bipartisan report can't quite bring itself to use the words, it would seem that the Bush anti-terror doctrine lives.
These columns have been rough on the Commission, especially for the partisanship that has marked its deliberations. But perhaps our pounding helped, because its unanimous final report seems on our first reading to be better than the process that produced it. Its narrative history is especially helpful, filling in much of the record of what the government knew, when it knew it, and what it didn't do about it.
We refer readers specifically to the recitation of non-action that starts on page 11 of the executive summary. Beginning in 1997, the U.S. tried diplomacy to get the Taliban to drop al Qaeda and Pakistan to drop the Taliban, but the efforts failed. We now know that only an ultimatum turned Pakistan, and only military force toppled Mullah Omar.
The report discloses that the CIA failed to infiltrate the terrorist Islamic network with even a single spy. The FBI failed to share crucial information about terrorist suspects. In other words, our security bureaucracies became hidebound and self-protective over the years, and their cultures need a thorough shaking up.
The report is especially damning in its revelations about the law enforcement mindset toward terrorism that prevailed before 9/11. Top CIA analysts--many of whom are now critical of the Bush Administration--thought it was a manageable problem. FBI investigations were "geared toward prosecution," the report notes, and hampered by "perceived legal barriers to sharing information." Part of this was due to the infamous "wall of separation" between intelligence and law enforcement that was reinforced in 1995 by Clinton Deputy Attorney General (and 9/11 Commissioner) Jamie Gorelick. The Patriot Act took down that wall, and the report amounts to a rousing endorsement of that much-maligned legislation.
Notably, the Commission performs a service by defining the threat we now face in refreshing fashion. "The enemy is not just 'terrorism,' " it says. "It is the threat posed specifically by Islamic terrorism." Bush Administration officials say the same thing privately, but they have been reluctant to state this publicly lest they offend the broader body of peaceable Islam. But it is hard to defeat an enemy without defining who it is. And the fact that Islam has a problem with its radical factions is something that Muslims themselves have to face up to.
This failure to speak candidly has ramifications at home, too, specifically in the Transportation Department's continued failure to endorse racial profiling in airport security checks. The policy reduces the government's credibility among ordinary Americans who understand that the policy defies common sense. Commissioner John Lehman noted at one hearing that any airline that set aside more than two Middle Eastern-looking passengers for secondary security clearing at any one time still faces large anti-discrimination fines.
The report also sheds new light on the issue of "state sponsors" of terror, especially Iran and Iraq. The Iran information--including pass-through rights without border stamps for al Qaeda--should give pause to those who think diplomacy alone will mollify the mullahs.
As for Iraq, the final report retreats from its interim judgment that there was no "collaborative relationship." The Commission now says it found no "collaborative operational relationship" to attack the U.S., but it does record extensive and troubling contacts. This includes the news that Richard Clarke, the former NSC aide, himself believed that Iraq had ties to the chemical plant in Sudan that was linked to al Qaeda and bombed by Bill Clinton. The report quotes Mr. Clarke as speculating to a superior about an "Iraq-al Qida [sic] agreement" on the chemical plant. Our readers may recall that Mr. Clarke more recently said there was not a shred of evidence of such ties.
As for the Commission's many proposals, they deserve to be examined, though count us skeptical on the idea of unifying all intelligence agencies under the control of a Cabinet-level intelligence czar. It might change bureaucratic incentives for the better, but it might also create a new and equally dangerous kind of groupthink. At the very least Congress should wait until the intelligence review commission led by former Senator Charles Robb and federal appeals court Judge Laurence Silberman reports next year.
The details, however, should not obscure the Commission's larger message about the dangers of not acting against a looming threat. After a year of recriminations against a President who chose to act against another threat, in Iraq, the report may even do some good.
Well, that's over with (mostly). See, this entry's title isn't really metaphoric. For the last three days I've been kind of housesitting my brother's new Seeing-Eye puppy, this being the second time our family has raised one of the little beasties. Ginny is 11 weeks old today, and an adorably cute yellow lab/retreiver mix who is starting to get just a little too big for your lap and absolutely refuses to acknowledge this last fact. She is also given to pissing on the floor with about three seconds of warning, and since my mom is in Omaha, my brother in Mexico, my sister a counselor at a kids' camp, and my dad at work, it's been me and the dogs at home.
This has been frustrating at times (up at 5:00AM three days in a row), but overall pretty relaxing. If you sit in one of our recliners, Ginny will happily sit with you, and after about ten minutes, be sound asleep in your lap. Our other dog, Lady, is really sweet about the whole thing, and Ginny seems to be more jealous of Lady than vice versa (which is as it should be :). So I've had time to do a little paperwork for school, and am in the process of borrowing a shit-ton of money. I'm also looking for apartments in New York, and will be calling about a great little studio-loft deal on W. 80th and Broadway tomorrow afternoon. I've had time to watch American Spendor, the Sci-Fi Channel's Dune and Children of Dune miniseries, and We Were Soldiers. Today I got two emails from people with InterVarsity at Columbia with leads on apartments. I'll follow up on them tomorrow as well.
I also picked up a bit of a new addiction: the maddeningly addictive Adventure Quest, described accurately as a "lunch-break sized RPG". Really simple gameplay (Flash required, I'm afraid), and a decent amount of free content, though I get the impression that there's a lot more for paying "Guardians" (one-time $12 gets you in for good). Those of you who like their souls and/or marriages in their present condition should probably avoid the above link.
And that's about it for now. I've barely talked with anyone in about 72 hours, so it's been quiet. I'm out.
It's old, and it's been around before, but this is just awesome.
I've periodically read articles on Samizdata, but never actually mustered up the energy to link there. But this morning I stumbled across a permalink to their glossary for the entry "anti-idiotarian" and just had to link. The definition is as follows:
"noun. Someone opposed to a whole raft of political values which are derived from a fundamentally irrational meta-context (world view). Anti-idiotarians can be found across a wide section of the political spectrum and are primarily characterised by vocal rational judgmentalism, generally hawkish sentiments and transcendent loathing of Noam Chomsky.
(coined by Charles Johnson)
Usage: "Like most anti-idiotarians I cannot but marvel as the sight of the Palestinian leadership forming yet another circular firing squad at the first grudging sign of reasonable behaviour by the Israeli government"
- Perry de Havilland."
Any site that uses the phrase "transcendent loathing of Noam Chomsky" is automatically okay in my book. The netheads at Samizdata are a generally free-market, generally individualistic, self-consciously partisan, and occasionally silly bunch. They are great supporters of the memehack, and if I could find some way of getting this on my main page I would do it immediately. They are also apparently fans of hippopotami, though I admit that I am not among those "in the know".
Jesse and Celine met for the first time almost exactly nine years ago, summer 1995, entirely at random, on a train to Vienna. This is the premise to Before Sunset, the sequal to the beautiful Before Sunrise, both directed by Richard Linklater and written by him and Kim Krizan. If you liked Before Sunrise, or if you were curious what happened to those two people, and especially if you were given a spasm of hope by their scene in Waking Life, you need to see this movie.
A warning though. With the notable exception of School of Rock, Linklater's movies consist almost entirely of people talking. Before Sunrise is the story of two people who meet and decide, on a whim, to get off the train and spend the next 14 hours together. The movie is basically just a record of the highlights of their extended conversation and nothing else. If this sounds boring, one of several things are possibly true: 1) You are not a very good conversationalist; 2) You don't have a very long attention span; or more charitably, 3) You think that most of the conversations that young lovers given to intellectual pretensions engage in are pretty wankish. While I would give the first two serious consideration, it's the last that has the most bearing on Before Sunrise. The beauty of that movie is that it shows something that really does happen in the way that it really does happen.
Romantic comedies have it all wrong: the guy doesn't finally win the girl's heart by some extravagent and pseudo-spontaneous single event which sets them on the path of perfect love for the rest of their lives. No, what happens is people talk. A lot. The beauty of Before Sunrise is in the fact that the conversations Jesse and Celine have are conversations that people getting to know each other actually have. Not only that, but if during your early twenties you've ever tried to get to know someone in whom you were romantically interested you'll recognize that you have had those exact conversations, or essential variations of them. Linklater captures the emotional tone exactly, right down to the two of them wanting to kiss in a listening booth at a used record store and completely chickening out. Linklater's forte is capturing these slice-of-life bits, and he is truly good at it, awkwardness and all.
Before Sunset takes place nine years later, summer 2004. Jesse is in Paris promoting his new book, a minor international bestseller, and Celine, living in Paris, shows up. Things go from there. There are actually a decent amount of plot twists involved, so I'm not going to go into detail, but suffice it to say that the early-twenties wanker has long been matured out of these two people. These people now have lives, careers, and are more or less established. So their meeting is a very different kind of thing.
Nonetheless, Linklater's craft has only improved with time. Quite a few of the conversations in Before Sunrise came of as set-pieces, and somehow failed to be entirely convincingly genuine. This happens a lot less frequently in Sunset, probably due in no small part to the fact that the abstract pretensions college students engage in are frequently abandoned as one realizes that one has better things to do. Additionally, whereas in Sunrise we were dealing essentially with strangers, in Sunset we're dealing with people who have a history, no matter how distant or brief. They have context. As real as Sunrise was, Sunset is possessed of an emotional depth its predecessor can't match.
Technically, Linklater has also improved with age. He uses almost entirely natural lighting. Lots of pure Parisian sunlight, down to the actors falling into shadow as their boat goes under a bridge. This also makes for some really lovely closeups. In one particularly impressive shot, Jesse and Celine are walking up a multi-floor spiral staircase, and the camera follows them at eye level the whole way up, rotating to keep them perfectly in frame.
Linklater has done it again.
So yesterday I drove to western New York with a friend so she could do pictures of a wedding. As I had never met any of the people involved in the wedding before, the car ride was significantly more fun than the actual event.
See, here's the thing. I'm not sure whether or not it's possible to set up a hit on one's self or not, but I'm gonna try. I hereby declare to anyone who reads this that if in my wedding either a Tim McGraw song is used as the processional ("She's My Kind of Rain" in this case) or a Third Day song (an electronic keyboard arrangement of "Agnus Dei") is used as the recessional, whoever wants to may kill me with whatever means they deem appropriate. Use of deadly force is authorized.
So, life progresses. I'm back in Hershey, PA, where I'll be for the duration of the summer. It turns out that getting a car retitled and getting a new drivers license is really a pain, just in case you were wondering.
I've spent a lot of this week with friends. I had a few people over for dinner last night, and someone else is coming over tonight. See, here's the thing: there's no place to go in this town. There used to be a decent bar/restaurant called "Froggie's", but the owner, for reasons only known to him, decided that it would be a great money-making strategy to convert what was Hershey's only place for non-redneck 20-something's to hang out into a dance club. Brilliant move, Spanky. So whenever my friends and I want to do something, it generally involves hanging out at my parents' place. I don't mind this much: those who have been here will verify that it's a nice house in a nice location. But sometimes you just want to go out for a few drinks, you know?
I'm still messing around with Gentoo, as I can't get X to work. Ifigured out that the system hasn't configured my USB devices correctly. It does recognize they're there, as dmesg will very nicely report the identity and location of devices when I hot-swap them, but as far as I can tell the input is getting chucked. It certainly isn't linked to /dev/mouse where it should be going. So if anyone knows how to track down the input data from USB devices without already knowing where it is (cat /dev/mouse gives nothing, as does cat /dev/usbmouse, please feel free to share.
The apartment I had a lead on was rented to someone else. Damn. Still, I've got a lead on two others, one in Washington Heights, the other on the Upper East Side. Either would be cool, and the rent is decent.
I guess that's it for now. Oh, right, contact info. Email works as always, as does commenting here. Phone contact is a bit sketchy, as my SprintPCS phone doesn't work around here. I got a new Verizon phone, but I won't be using it much till I move to NY. I'll email my home number to anyone who needs it.
Later.
So I guess this is it. As of 10:00 AM tomorrow, I'm leaving Chattanooga, pretty much for good. Sure, I guess I'll be back now and then, but I've got no plans as to when. How often seems to be not very.
It's been good here. I've made a lot of friends. It's tough to leave. A place may be just a place, but parting with friends is a sadness. Three and a half years at Covenant. Six months in St. Elmo. A summer in Tiftonia. A year on Blackwatch (okay, maybe that wasn't a highlight...) Two and a half years on Catacombs (ahh, the Combs...). Ten different room/housemates. Swimming at Blue Hole. 10PM drives south on Scenic Highway. Two hour dinners at the Great Hall. Various near-misses with various young women. The beginning, middle, and end of my first truly serious relationship. Getting dumped. Providing the core of the iTunes network for everyone. Soaped up runs through 1st Belz. Pickled piss possums. Enjoying the cool of the evening in Chattanooga Valley with a cold one. Perfecting the art of the woah. Midnight showings at the Bijou. Strolls across the Walking Bridge. Driving to shows in Nashville. Hitting 100 in a minivan. Wrangling with Kierkegaard and Kant in the commons. Marathon study sessions for Modern Philosophy. Getting the whole hall hooked on Scorched Earth. Hiking down to the bluff. Piling on the couch in the Student Apartments. Dinner with 5th North after church. Foosball at midnight. High-tailing it down I-81 at 3:00AM because we're going to New York. Feasting at the Lord's Table at the first church I could truly be at peace. These are things I will remember. These are things I will take with me. These are things that are from a chapter of my life which is now over.
This is entry 300 on this blog. That's a little less than once per day. I imagine I'll keep posting here, though if Josiah ever gets NewYorkBlogs up and running I'll probably move over there.
I'm headed over to Lupi's for one last dinner with friends before hitting the road tomorrow. Lots of good times there. Goodbyes were said on Wednesday. More will be said tonight. There are people here who are special to me that I may not see again for years. Some of them I may never see again this side of the veil. My heart is heavy, but full to bursting. The future is bright, but the past has been good. We carry it with us even as we let it go.
That's about all I've got. The next post on this site will be from the Northeast, from my parents' house. Contact info will become available as it solidifies; leave a comment if you need it.
This is Ryan Davidson, signing off from Chattanooga, TN. Goodnight.
That's what I've been doing all morning: emerge system, emerge nvidia-kernel, emerge nforce-net, and more. This is a lot more fun than cursing at IDE busses that refuse to consistently recognize drives, but it's still a bit tedious. Still, I'm learning. Only a few more steps to go before I close Knoppix and boot off a real, honest-to-goodness Gentoo installation.
T-minus 1 day and counting. I now have about 43 hours left in Chattanooga.