Coalition / Iraq:
killed: 200 / 1,500
wounded: 300 / 3500
tanks: 32 / 87
other armored vehicles: 33 / 52
helicopters: 14 / 0
artillery pieces: 0 / 172

Translation by The Agonist.

This Russian analysis contains assorted bad news, which sounds like normal war problems. But I thought we had a Transformational Military that wouldn't suffer from normal war problems. If we don't, how are we going to defeat a numerically superior force unencumbered by rules of war and fighting to the death in its home territory, without causing so many civilian casualties as to fail the political mission that's the justification for the war?

The first part of the [coalition] plan - a march across the desert toward Karabela - was achieved, albeit with serious delays. The second part of the plan [to go around Basra through An-Nasiriya toward Al-Ammara ... splitting Iraq in half] in essence has failed.

Analysts point out that capture of Basra is viewed by the coalition command as being exceptionally important and as a model for the future "bloodless" takeover of Baghdad. So far, however, this approach does not work and the city's garrison is actively defending its territory.

Already, radio intercepts indicate, all available [coalition] repair units have been deployed to the front. Over 60% of all available spare parts have been already used and emergency additional supplies are being requested.

The sand is literally "eating up" the equipment. Sand has a particularly serious effect on electronics and transmissions of combat vehicles. Already more than 40 tanks and up to 69 armored personnel carriers have been disabled due to damaged engines; more than 150 armored vehicles have lost the use of their heat-seeking targeting sights and night vision equipment.

Currently, as intercepted radio communications show, the coalition command is trying to establish the whereabouts of more than 500 of its troops that fell behind their units, departed with resupply convoys or were carrying out individual assignments. So far it was not possible to establish how many of these troops are dead, captured or have successfully reached other units.

I found a lawyer who works for another landlord. He spends most of his days in court trying to evict tenants. I thought he would be perfect to protect me from the likes of — him. And he was. As he was reading through a lease, he said to me, "OK, this paragraph, I really like this clause, I think I'm going to steal it and use it in my own contracts." Pause. He reaches for a red pen and crosses out the paragraph. "But you're not signing it."

It appears that Bush administration's Labor Department is actually trying to make a law more fair.

Workers now are exempt from overtime pay if they earn more than $155 a week, or $8,060 a year, and meet other convoluted, confusing job criteria, such as devoting at least 80 percent of their time to "exercising discretion" and other "intellectual" tasks that cannot be "standardized in ... a given period of time."

The proposal would raise the salary cap to $425 a week, or $22,100 a year, and any worker earning less automatically would be required to receive overtime pay.

Jobs most affected by the changes likely would be assistant managers of stores, restaurants and bars, McCutchen said. They would get overtime pay despite their management status as long as they earn less than $22,100 a year.

This war isn't really about Iraq or deposing Saddam or even eliminating his WMD, though each of those are important benefits along the way. Nor is it something so mundane as a 'war for oil.' The leading architects of this war in and out of the administration see this war, and have pursued it, as an opening blow in a far broader war against political Islam. They see it as the first in a series of wars and near-wars which will lead eventually to the overthrow of most of the current governments in the Middle East, the establishment of western-oriented democracies throughout the Arab world, and the destruction of nothing less than the political world of Islamic fundamentalism.

That, as you might say, is a rather tall order. And it would have been very hard for the administration to sell the American people on such a struggle. So it didn't try. It pushed rather to get us into Iraq, knowing that if it went about the process in the right way it would make a further series of wars against Iran, Syria and perhaps lower-level hostilities against Saudi Arabia and Egypt all but inevitable.

I picked up my "pre-owned" Saab 9-5 Wagon tonight. My first stop on the way home was Home Depot. I think I've turned into a lesbian. (If it was a Subaru wagon, I'd be a Seattle lesbian.)

Not to mention that he´s REALLY FUCKING WEIRD LOOKING, even when he´s dressed in a tuxedo. He waddles all funny and his face is crooked and he sneers and he never shaves or combs his hair, and his eyes look in like six different directions at once. ... And ... he made all these disturbed POINTING JABBING GESTURES at the audience, like he was on drugs ....

And Chris Cooper, who won the Oscar for best supporting actor in "Adaptation", and Pedro Aldomodovodomar, who won the Oscar for best original screenplay in "That Softcore Spanish One with Subtitles", they both got up and gussied around and prayed for peace and shit. Fuck that. OUTRAGE is the APPROPRIATE RESPONSE, you GUTTERING LOONS. Not RESTRAINED MUSHMOUTHEDNESS. Anger and shouting. DISTURBING JABBY GESTURES are the call of the day, and I just hope that more folks like Michael Moore start getting on TV to make them.

Of course, not all civil liberties received such cavalier treatment. Although the PATRIOT Act allows the FBI to obtain records showing what books you purchased at the local bookstore or checked out from the library -- a suspect's reading habits might suggest an unsettling interest in the architecture of tall buildings -- Ashcroft has insisted that the FBI cannot review the records of gun-purchase background checks in the course of a terror investigation.

Between 10,000 and 100,000 American veterans of the first Gulf War have abnormal symptoms attributed to "Gulf War Syndrome." The graphic on the right side of this NY Times article outlines possible causes, such as:

• 69% took pyridostigmine bromide pills to protect vs nerve gas
• 53% had anthrax vaccination
• 30% bathed on water not provided by the military

In situations like these, the actual facts play only a modest role in shaping public opinion, especially when the "facts" are nebulous, subjective, and largely unquantifiable. ... And one surprisingly effective tactic is to assert the point under debate by calmly behaving as if there were no debate and moving on to the next step. ... This places those arguing the opposite side ... in the awkward position of constantly having to re-establish that the debate is still open, without boring, tiring, or otherwise turning off the only semi-interested public.

Most everybody I know personally is either a spectator in this war or, for the few soldiers I know, a pawn. Meanwhile in the blog world this amazing drama is unfolding as we read the daily entries of this poor bastard posting live from Baghdad, and his friends and internet contacts around the world and right next door. One of whom writes:

I cannot not not not get over the irony of this war and how we are all communicating with one another. I am a sort-of-hawk (at least, conditionally pro-war), and I am communicating with a Baghdadi from New York City; an Israeli puts up a mirror site for this Iraqi; the guy in Baghdad wishes an Israeli woman and her family well while he is about to be shocked and awed by my country's unparalleled ability to wage war; she puts up a website from the IDF Home Command for him to download a PDF survival guide in Arabic.

Today, I bought a Dixie Chicks t-shirt from their website. I had to do something to show solidarity with Natalie Maines, who got into a big ol' heap of trouble after she dared speak out against dubya at a concert in England. Radio stations are blacklisting the band; some DJs are staging CD-burnings, CD-bulldozings... My t-shirt will end up costing me about a bazillion Canadian dollars after the exchange rate, but hey--it's less stress than marching in the rain for peace! I know there probably won't be a lot of Chicks fans on Joel's website, but if anyone has their latest album (Home), I dare you to play track 3 (Travelin' Soldier) and not get ferklempt.

This is an excerpt from Cool 2B Real, which "is about real girls like you! Whether you're in school, playing sports or just having fun, strive to be the best you can be!" It offers this "Tip on Keepin' Fit":

Eat a variety of foods.

By eating foods like beef, bagels, yogurt, vegetables and fruit, you will stay on top of your game.

(Emphasis added.) You may or may not be surprised to learn that the site is "Funded by America's Beef Producers SM."

What has come to trouble me most over past weeks is the suspicion that if the hanging chads in Florida had gone the other way and Al Gore had been elected, we would not now be about to commit British troops.

(And Tony Blair's speech, infinitely better than Bush's.)

"The Constitution just sets minimums," Scalia said at John Carroll University. "Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires." ... He said that in wartime, one can expect "the protections will be ratcheted right down to the constitutional minimum. I won't let it go beyond the constitutional minimum."

"If he comes [today] and I face him, I'll hit him... I won't try to hit him in the head, but I'll hit him. And if he charges me, I'll kill him." --Jose Mesa, Phillies pitcher, on Indians shortstop and former teammate Omar Vizquel (ESPN.com)

"I really like Jose... No matter what happened on the field, I still think he's a good guy." --Omar Vizquel, Indians shortstop, on Mesa

"If he comes to apologize, I will punch him right in the face... And then I'll kill him." --Mesa

Heeding appeals from techno-types, in 2000 Bill Clinton ended the deliberate degrading of the free GPS signal. Now your car not only knows exactly how many feet you are from the Pennsylvania Turnpike exit, it knows which lane of the highway you're in.

Making the free signal as precise as the military signal also meant any GPS receiver purchased by Iraq or any other nation is now just as accurate as U.S. military receivers. There's a backup plan, of course. The Pentagon can order the free GPS signal temporarily degraded on a regional basis. This will happen in the Persian Gulf area some time soon. When the GPS-equipped Land Rovers of the Saudi dynastic elite suddenly stop knowing which mansion's circular drive to turn up, the assault on Iraq will be imminent.

But more than a few jaws dropped when WorldCom noted that it would write down the value of its property, plant and equipment and other intangible assets to $10 billion from $44.8 billion. That meant that WorldCom's hard assets, including its network, are now worth almost 75 percent less than what they had cost. And don't forget, these assets were bought with actual cash, not highflying shares.

So let's follow the money. Worldcom overpaid thirty billion dollars. Where did that money come from? From cash flow, i.e. from customers' monthly checks? Borrowed from banks? Borrowed from the stock market? Where did it go? A lot of construction workers got paid to dig ditches. Raw materials, parts, and salaries at Lucent, Cisco, etc. People who cashed out of telecom suppliers before 2001. What fraction of all this was a wealth transfer from one class of investors to another?

I look at Paul Wolfowitz or Richard Pearle, I think of a guy who read that scene in Atlas Shrugged in which one of Ayn Rand's rich supermen confidently piloted a speed boat after fifteen minutes of watching someone else fiddle with it and thought, that's how I'm going to live my life.

Today there was another rubber band shooting occurrence. ... Since this is not acceptable behavior, if it continues, it will result in penalty. (Circuit City internal memo)

To the person (or persons) who finds it funny to repeatedly position my star wars figurines in inappropriate positions, please stop. The note I put there requesting this to NOT be done was not a challenge for you to do it again, or to see how grotesque and inappropriate you could get. In all seriousness, I ask you to stop. I find this extremely inappropriate, distastefull, offensive, and in no way, humorous. If this continues, I will report this to HR. (Navitaire internal memo)

Lest any confusion remain, this is not a suggestion or a request that Padilla be permitted to consult with counsel, and it is certainly not an invitation to conduct a further 'dialogue' about whether he will be permitted to do so. It is a ruling -- a determination -- that he will be permitted to do so. -- U.S. District Judge Michael Mukasey

Benaroya Hall, Seattle, WA, USA, 14 March 2003

The idea with this concert, part of a three-night series, was that UW professor Barry Lieberman modified many classical string pieces to add a double-bass part. And then got "Fifteen Internationally Renowned Guest Artists" together to play them in a nice concert hall. Though since he was one of the fifteen, who's the Host Artist?

Mozart, String Quartet No 19 in C Major. The very beginning, with the ominious bass part, sounded like movie music. Then it all pretty much blended together and I didn't stay very focussed. One of the violins, according to the notes, was made in 1652. But the violins all looked about the same, and nobody really looked much like their head shots in the program guide, so I couldn't figure out which it was. Can you imagine writing sheet music for an electric guitar or a synthesizer and, three centuries later, that instrument not only still existing but being unchanged in sound and appearance?

Beethoven, String Quartet No. 11 in f minor. This got my attention. I enjoyed it quite a bit more than the Mozart. Seated in the fifth row, we could hear the concertmaster (lead violinist) very clearly: before each new passage, she took a short, intense breath through the nose, what we call in my martial arts class a "combative breath," and then attacked her violin fiercly with her bow. It was very impressive. (As you can see, I'm bringing the full weight of my extensive, detailed knowledge of classical music to bear in this review. By counting the parts where it felt like we should applaud but nobody did, I was even able to track which movement we were on. Hey, what do left-handed string players do? Play backwards? Reverse the strings?)

Tchaikovsky, Serenade for Strings, in C Major. My favorite piece of the night. It had two modes. In one, all fifteen players - a bass, two cellos, two or three violas, many violins - performed exactly the same notes at exactly the same time. (Well, I guess maybe some of the bigger instruments played related notes in different, I guess they're octaves or something. I wouldn't know, really.) That mode was very loud, and everybody was really tight so it sounded great.

In the other mode, about ten people would all play one melody while another melody would hop back and forth across the remaining players, who either bowed or plucked a few notes at a time. Again, they were all very tight, so that it was like one musician playing continuously while jumping around the stage, while surrounded by another musician with twenty hands. I liked the Tchaikovsky the most.

The word is that Dick Cheney may be gravitating toward tactical alliance with Colin Powell over Korea. Cheney seems to be thinking that as fun as regime change in Pyongyang might be, the US is focused on Iraq and then later on Iran. And he doesn't want Korea blowing up while the US has important business to get done in the Persian Gulf. (Even global hegemons have to set priorities!)

So we -- spammers and the spammed alike -- have a common interest in finding a way to efficiently target only the people who really want to buy Viagra. I believe it can be done. Any ideas? - Robert X. Cringley

Huh? If it weren't Cringely saying it, I'd shoot the bastard. But since it's him, I think about it... - Steve

Well I say, shoot the bastard. Here's why.

His column, boiled down, says this:

0) [A red herring discussion of advertising-supported content]
1) Spam is the only successful type of internet advertising. If it wasn't profitable, it wouldn't exist
2) Spam is corrosive to email
3) Email is the killer app of the internet
4) We non-spammers should find a way to help spammers target their spam. Then it won't be corrosive.

0 I'll come back to later.

I agree with 1, 2, and 3.

I disagree with 4. It's true but too narrow. He's proposing an undefined systemic accomodation for a problem caused by a well-defined systemic flaw. As long as we're doing systemic fixes, why not fix the real problem?

Spammers are parasites who make money via quirks of the SMTP protocol. Specifically, the way email works today spammers can make recipients pay for some of the cost of each email. The solution is then to change our mail protocol.

Once spammers have to pay representative amounts of money, spam will be like junk mail. This may not sound like a big win, but it is, for three reasons. First, increased spammer cost will set a ceiling on volume, just as we don't get ten pounds of junk mail in our mailboxes. Second, increased cost will put the onus on spammers themselves to improve targetting accuracy, thus addressing the corrosion problem. Third, spam (and ultimately the morons who buy all the viagra and whatnot) will subsidize the rest of the internet.

Yes, changing our email infrastructure will be annoying and expensive. But it's a specific, concrete idea (here's one proposal) with a high chance of success. If it were implemented at the MTA level (back office) instead of MUA (desktop email programs), it would require hundreds of thousands of systems to change, but not hundreds of millions.

Now let's go back and look at the red herring, the implied link between spam and advertising-supporting content. The obvious conclusion, which perhaps he's saving for his next column, is that we should find some way to support content with spam, because that's the only kind of advertising that's profitable. Once again, let's look at the real systemic problem.

The real systemic problem is advertising-supported content itself. It's a system we've inherited from earlier broadcast media, where it succeeded due to the nature of the technology. If you want to produce content and send it to millions of households, and you have no way to charge any of them money, how do you collect money? You sell the attention of your audience to interested parties. Interested parties means advertisers. Since it's a business, that means that creative decisions are effectively made by advertisers.

Consequences? News is censored to avoid offending advertisers. Content is planned around the disposable income of the audiences it will attract. Content that takes time to develop audiences, or that appeals to niche audiences, is usually killed in favor of more immediately profitable material.

When the internet went commercial advertising-supported content was the most obvious pure-internet business model simply because it's what had come before. Now that it's failed, now that no business model is obviously successful, what possible reason could there be keep recussitating on the web the system that made television and radio intolerably bad for so many decades? Instead, let's keep experimenting with audience-supported content - for example Salon, the WSJ, and porn - and with micropayments and related technologies that were impossible in the 1930s but technically trivial today. Audience-supported content may not work yet, but neither does advertising, and only one the two has a future.

And let's recognize that the huge success of the internet, the killer app of the internet, is free content. All those emails zipping back and forth - that's content that people write and then just give away for free. All these weblogs, from crap to professional writing, give away content for free. As long as we all shell out twenty bucks a month to keep the machines humming, why should anybody else get a dime? Cringley writes:

Yahoo suddenly wants us to pay -- because they have figured out that advertisers won't pay, at least not enough to support the kind of earnings growth demanded by Wall Street.

If you haven't yet figured out that "earnings growth" is code for pyramid scheme, you're an idiot. And if you have, and you just want in before the pyramid collapses - collapses the rest of the way, I suppose - you're a criminal. Let's do our audience-supported experiments without the "benefits" of venture capital and Wall Street. I'm not saying down with capitalism, but I am saying, "up with post-capitalism." I'm just not sure what that is yet. But it probably includes blogs and micropayments and peer to peer. And it's a safe bet to have porn.

"I had a guy in a Dodge pickup pull up behind me 6 feet off my bumper, flashing his high beams," said Ramsey, as we tooled south. "He ran up next to me and gave me the one-finger wave, then pulled in front and slammed on the brakes."

Trooper Ramsey smiled. His white teeth gleamed.

"Of course," he said, "this was all on video."

But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and—most important—the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, ... If a country is either losing out to globalization or rejecting much of the content flows associated with its advance, there is a far greater chance that the U.S. will end up sending forces at some point. ...

It is America’s continued success in deterring global war and obsolescing state-on-state war that allows us to stick our noses into the far more difficult subnational conflicts and the dangerous transnational actors they spawn.

What I want to know (as per Measuring Lost Freedom vs. Security in Dollars, Andrews, Edmund L. New York Times. 10 March 2003) is, how would one go about quantitatively measuring the positive impact of American intervention and post-war reconstruction in WWII against the negative impact of most other American military interventions and politically motivated covert operations? I want to keep score.

WASHINGTON: Iran's progress towards building a nuclear bomb was "startling" and "eye-opening", Director General of International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed ElBaradei has said.

So if the United States were to sequentially invade every nuclear power and force regime change, what would be the best order? Assuming we give ourselves a bye even though we're the only country ever to actually use such a weapon, who's most dangerous? The declared powers are the US, Russia, Britain, France, China, Pakistan, and India. Israel has 'em. North Korea probably has 'em. Iran and Iraq are both working on them, though Iraq apparently isn't very close at all. Do we do start with the geographically convenient Iran and Israel after we do Iraq, or should we go in reverse order of threat? How many people in the Pentagon do you think are currently working on this problem?

In the course of her research Priest learned two things—that the CinCs are figures of extraordinary power throughout the territory they command, far more influential than American ambassadors; and that "the mission" of the US military has expanded enormously in the last decade or two. "The US government had grown increasingly dependent on its military to carry out its foreign affairs."

[General Zinni] concluded that "he had become a modern-day proconsul, descendant of the warrior-statesmen who ruled the Roman Empire's outlying territory, bringing order and ideals from a legalistic Rome. Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus—they would have understood. His compatriots, he knew, did not."

...

Zinni was often restive with Washington's half-measures, but in every other way he got what he wanted. He traveled in his own plane with an entourage of thirty or more, and he ran his mini-empire from Centcom headquarters in Tampa, Florida, where he was aided by a staff of more than a thousand backed by a special CinC budget of more than $50 million a year. One impression emerges clearly from Priest's account of the instrument under Zinni's control: the military is the only generously funded institution in American public life.

There are three things that govern a network. Fear is the first thing. It drives almost every decision they make. The only thing that trumps fear is greed. ... And the thing that can triumph over greed is stupidity, and stupidity usually wins the day. - Larry Wilmore, producer of Bernie Mac. Entertainment Weekly. March 14, 2003, p 34.

They also do this really weird thing: Any of the drivers can buy the winner's carburetor for $400 at the end of the race. The reason they do this is that some guys have their carburetor precision machined to goose up its performance in a way that their instruments can't detect. With this rule, drivers know that they face having to sell a special carburetor that may have cost as much as $2500 for a mere $400. It helps keep them honest.

I wonder if this technique for cutting down on race car cheating could be applied to doping in human sports. What if you could buy the winner's heart and lungs for a fixed price?

Six months after The Threatening Storm's publication, however, Pollack's book reads as much like an indictment of the Bush administration's overeagerness to go to war as it does an endorsement of it. A more appropriate subtitle for the book would have been The Case for Rebuilding Afghanistan, Destroying al-Qaida, Setting Israel and Palestine on the Road to Peace, and Then, a Year or Two Down the Road After Some Diplomacy, Invading Iraq.

This summary of the IT industry is both thorough and pithy, and is accurate as far as I can tell. I highly recommend it. Here I excerpt a few bits about Microsoft.

At the root of Microsoft's problems is its financial structure. Leveraged by stock options and other financial tricks (R7), it depends heavily on rapid revenue growth and increasing stock value. When you've saturated your market (over 90%), and that market is stagnant, rapid revenue growth becomes difficult. Should future growth look poor, holders of stock options are likely to cash out, and much of that $43 Billion evaporates.

By necessity, Microsoft must expand into new markets. Problem is, they've never been particularly successful in entering any markets where they could not leverage their monopolies. As is true of other monopolies, they simply aren't competitive in open markets. While Windows has a profit margin of 85%, and Microsoft Office has a margin of 79%, every other Microsoft division is losing money in reams (R4).

... The very disappointing uptake of Windows XP has convinced Microsoft they must force upgrades. License 6 does force customers to upgrade on Microsoft's schedule, whether they want to or not, but a majority of the market has not adopted License 6, despite Microsoft's threats. Clearly drastic changes are needed to Windows to generate renewed upgrade revenue. ...

The Longhorn filesystem will be based on the technology of a re-thought and expanded SQL Server database (the project coded Yukon) ... Current Windows based software will not be compatible with the Longhorn filesystem. Microsoft has already stated that all their own software has to be rewritten for it - so will everyone else's. This will eliminate a huge number of software titles which are useful, but not sufficiently profitable to justify rewriting them. ...

Coming with Longhorn is a new user interface, code named Sideshow (W5), so if you're currently trying to make sense of the new Windows XP user interface, 2005 is when Billy intends to yank your chain again. If you're a Windows programmer, you get to learn a new API framework named Avalon (W6) too.

For me, the most interesting thing about video games is taking the controller and using it to move something around on the screen. - [legendary Nintendo designer] Shigeru Miyamoto

(I tried seven or eight Xbox games and every single one failed this measure.)