They don't do much for having been wrong either.
Though it is way pre-invasion, I will link to one of those few things that was reassuring in the face of American jingoism back then.
2003 was a long time ago, so my memory's a little fuzzy, but basically the whole war was ogged's fault, right?
Of course it's 12 because Iraq was all Bill Clinton's fault.
Also it will be 10 years since my last arrest! That was a night to remember! I wonder how all those black Chicago cops* are feeling about things right now? Probably pretty good if they're the ones making $120 grand a year with double-overtime and shit.
*For those of you just tuning in, the male March 20 detainees were shipped all the way down to the southernmost police station in Chi town. Somewhere around 1000 of us were snatched, about a third were let go at 2 am on the south side, far from any El stop, about a third were held and then released without being booked, and about a third were actually booked and charged. One of my Mpls friends who was also there was saying last year that the settlement money might actually be getting paid out soon.
+2 years for shipping and handling. Body parts are measured by weight, not volume. Some settling may occur during transport.
Great job, Republicans. It's almost as if, despite all your education this and tradition that, none of you ever read Thucydides.
Do many of the "warbloggers" (rolls eyes, snickers) other than Insta-what's-his-face, survive persist?
Insta-lack-of-self-awareness?
Also, there is no hope for the American public.
10: Josh Trevino and Eric Erikson have both covered themselves in glory in the ensuing years, no? And Andrew Sullivan, last I checked, was still chugging away on the little apostasy engine that could.
Jeffrey Goldberg is still around and trying to buy an AR-15 to protect his penis.
10.2: Well, the bad thing about the Vietnam War was that we lost.
It's at least arguable that we won the Iraq War.
So, I guess it goes in the plus column in the history books.
I've thought about this quite a lot from the perspective of collective memory, and there's little doubt that, over time, we'll come to count the Iraq War as a win, which will be incredibly destructive to future foreign policy discussions. "If we'd only surged earlier and harder, it could have been a double+ win!!!"
Do many of the "warbloggers" (rolls eyes, snickers) other than Insta-what's-his-face, survive persist?
Yggles and Klein, who knew it was necessary to bash the hippies early, and then switch when possible.
Anyway, opposing the war meant stopping the war. Otherwise, it was simply a fashion statement, a recreational expression.
Lenin and Trotsky managed to stop Kerensky from killing thousands more Russians.
I was careful in my wording, but I did say at the time, among other things, that we needed a change of government immediately after September 11.
17: "Careful in my wording" = Pro-war!
Very careful indeed!
Well, the bad thing about the Vietnam War was that we lost.
Bad for who?
It would be interesting to see data on the percentage of Americans who think the Iraq war was a direct response to the Sept. 11 attacks, and how it's changed over time. Maybe it'll increase over time? My mom tells me pretty much all of the schoolteachers under age 30 where she works think that Iraq was directly involved in the Sept 11 attacks. Presumably some of them teach the kids this if it comes up.
I take it back, Kerensky and his allies killed thousands more anyway. Such are liberals.
Win for fucking whom? Blackwater got rich.
I am still trying to connect the "Arab Spring" and Bush's War, either as culmination or reaction or coincidence.
Something sure has happened. I wrote a comment earlier about dictators being bad for bidness, and banksters extraction from labor being best accomplished by psuedo-democracies. See Cyprus.
Whatever. I look at Asia these days. I don't see significant resistance from the ME anymore. They have been conquered.
19: I'm speaking as a typical patriotic United States citizen.
There's nothing the least bit condescending in this.
Iraq was directly involved in the Sept 11 attacks
To think otherwise would be to think that the US started a completely unjustified war. Which would be crazy.
Most people are logical and don't assume political leaders are actively evil, so if we attacked Iraq the assumption is that they were involved in Sept. 11, because otherwise our leaders are terrible people (and we elected them so we're terrible too.)
20: we surveyed 280 students in a single class (not a great methodology, but we weren't doing social science) a couple of years ago. More than 80% believed that Iraq was involved in 9/11, which was an odd response, because approximately half of the students in the class revealed that they're some brand of truther or another.
10: There is nothing Straussians love more than the T-man. Even if they do come up with weirdo strained translations in order to make him critical of Nicias. (Not to mention the fact [preteritio!] that they think T. endorses the Athenian position in the Melian dialog. No hope, I tell ya.)
I was reading an otherwise non-political book about failed movie projects (it's stupid! Don't read it!) and it had a line about the events of September 11th and how they led to invasions of two countries with nothing to do with the attacks or attackers, which, regardless of the wisdom of the war in Afghanistan, seemed to me like a fairly ahistorical liberal opposition to the ahistorical conservative theory that they both were highly relevant/involved.
If most people were logical, SP, they would assume that most political leaders ARE evil, wouldn't they?
18:My goal, in most of my ironic nonsense at the time, was to ensure that more Americans died than Arabs, which is only fair if you are the aggressive conquering invading evil party in a war.
I said at the time and was famous for it, that my first preference was for those Americans to die on American soil, getting rid of the fucking Republicans. Ask Katherine.
heebie got it right in the original post
Opposed the war? big whoops.
The dead and damaged, and they are far from limited to Iraq but are still dying, will not give you a medal.
30: "Ironic nonsense" -- maybe you should write for Spongebob!
(oops, sorry, that's "nautical nonsense")
Iraq was an inside job.
God, you'd hope so. Nobody should be working outside with the temperatures they get over there.
Also ten years since Ogged birthed this place. Accordingly, here's Ten Years Down the Drain (cover, tracklist), which began as a mix themed for the upcoming DC shenanigans, but then turned into the standard "what caught my ear since the last one of these" because I'm lazy and easily distracted. Everything was released roughly within the last year.
[edit: busted link replaced]
I've thought about this quite a lot from the perspective of collective memory, and there's little doubt that, over time, we'll come to count the Iraq War as a win
Which thoughts specifically are leading you to this confident belief?
35: Have you seen Saddam Hussein lately?
35. Militarily, the Iraq war was unquestionably a win. Geopolitically, it has been an unmitigated disaster for everybody with the possible exception of the Iraqi Kurds. The psychological glitch which has affected the American political class since at least 1945 and makes it impossible for them to consider both factors together before embarking on military adventures overseas has defined the world we live in for the last half century.
34: Halford's minions are denying access because of some "property" "rights" issue.
Have you seen Saddam Hussein lately?
I never saw him before, as he lived in Iraq, where his existence had little bearing on my life or yours.
38: Are you really getting blocked?
39: Well, he did fire Scud missiles at my mother.
I take it that your mother was in the United States military? Or vacationing in Kuwait?
42: She was living in Tel Aviv.
It seemed funny to pretend that like W. I had a personal grudge against Saddam.
But to be serious for once, from a very simplistic perspective the U.S did "win" the Iraq War. The goal was to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and the U.S. succeeded in doing this.
I had forgotten that Saddam fired missiles at Israel during the first Gulf War, and hadn't considered that as a basis for our second invasion.
I thought the goal was to spread democracy throughout the middle east and punish people who had contributed to terrorism.
37 gets it right. Put another way, US policy makers seem to be quite bad at balancing harms when it comes to the causes and consequences of war. Leaving Saddam Hussein in charge: almost certainly a very bad thing by almost any measure. Killing and maiming tens of thousands of people, uprooting hundreds of thousands of additional people, spending trillions of dollars, etc.: very likely an even worse thing.
But as a nation, unlike Britain with, say, WWI, the US has a very hard time remembering any of our wars as poor choices/lost. Only Vietnam comes close, and even then, the struggle over its memory is, as you've intimated, one of the defining elements of American politics and foreign policy for the last half century. I had hoped at one point that with Obama, the first post-Vietnam-era president, in office, we might get beyond these sorts of struggles. But of course there are too many people -- not all of whom are part of the military-industrial complex -- whose interests are served by continuing these memory fights.
43: I was in Tel Aviv at that time with my shiksa girlfriend. Her parents were really pissed at me.
Leaving Saddam Hussein in charge: almost certainly a very bad thing by almost any measure.
Do you think this is an appropriate question to ask of every leader of every country in the world? It's not as though Saddam Hussein were our middle manager, right?
And speaking of memory, I dimly recall a short piece published in the front section of The Atlantic (maybe?) approximately ten or fifteen years ago, the thesis of which was: foreign policy decisions in the United States since 1973 have boiled down to which side of a given debate can scream either "Munich" or "Vietnam" more loudly and authentically than the other. I wish I could find that piece.
44.1: You didn't forget that Saddam tried to kill W's dad, did you? I'm not sure if that is true, but it's generally believed anyway.
44.2: Those were vague self-justifying subsidiary goals. We got into World War I supposedly "to make the world safe for democracy". We didn't succeed at that, but still history has recorded it as a win for the U.S.A.
Generally I was led to believe that we didn't invade countries that hadn't exhibited some sort of aggression against us or our allies. And that's because we don't do yearly reviews for the leadership of every country in the world. Because we're lazy.
46: My turn to be shocked -- Von Wafer is my mother!
43 then who did we spend five years losing a war with after april 2003. More seriously I got the Iraq war basically right in 2002, we will overthrow Saddam, but the US doesn't have the force structure or numbers to conquer the country so we are going to be bogged down in some insurgency until we leave. I guarantee you, none of my pro-war collegaues at the time described that as a win.
but still history has recorded it as a win for the U.S.A.
and a few other countries who had a bit more at stake and suffered a few more casualties. But we entered that one because Germany sent a letter to Mexico or something, right? Hard to remember.
51: it's like that scene in Star Wars, only more Jewish and gender-bendery.
52: That part will be forgotten like the war in The Philippines after the U.S. won the Spanish-American War.
37
... Geopolitically, it has been an unmitigated disaster for everybody with the possible exception of the Iraqi Kurds. ...
The Iraqi Shia also. And Iran.
There's just something very unpleasant about the feeling I get whenever someone tells me confidently that some unhappy fact will be forgotten by future generations.
I think the unpleasantness arises from the implication that this is a good thing, or that it weighs in favor of something. If future generations are told that the Iraq War was a great success, then more is the pity for them and their world.
58: I agree with you. I'm being a pessimist.
Obviously House Harkonnen the international military-industrial complex won on Arrakis in Iraq. The spice oil is still flowing, right?
2002 = $35
2012 = $122
I hear a lot of American (and Canadian) owned oil and gas became profitable at those prices. And of course, the refineries.
But they did let him mouth some anti-war words on his way to the WH, which is all liberals really need for comfort and self-respect. A few empty words.
China Oil Imports 1980-2020
Mostly coming from Russia 19% Saudi Arabia 19% Angola 17%
As I have said, only partly influenced by Newberry, the triangle is paper for oil for commodities. Asset inflation and commodity and economic price stability => oil => which goes to China for development => which comes back to the west for paper.
So you are an asshole in 1995:"Damn China is ready to come online with cheap-ass labor. But they can't develop without mega-barrels of oil.
1) If oil prices go up due to China outbidding us, Jane SUV will get really pissed. We might have conservation (remember the 80s) and a badass recession. A mess.
2) But if we have an excuse, a cover for oil inflation, and can have some kind of asset boom (like housing) in the US, we might make it through the 2000s well enough to allow China to become the Walmart supplier of shiny baubles.
3) Then we would come into the 2010s with prices high enough, without conservation, to develop our North American fields. Fuck, the money. The money.
If I am smart enought to think of it, and you are smarter, then the PtB are both smarter and can hire the smartest.
Who won, and who is the patsy? Easy. You count up the winnings.
48: This? (From about 6 years ago. I haven't read it.)
34, 38: Apo, I'm getting blocked as well. ("Permission denied")
65, 38: Well that's just no good at all. This was much simpler when I had my own website. Give me a few minutes and I'll try an alternate route here.
64: yup, that's it. Thanks! Seriously, thanks so much for finding that.
OT: If this is the thread with latitude to go off-topic, have people seen the Tea Party's dystopian film short? Just 2 minutes long. It's fascinating to me. It's actually pretty well-done.
Does this work?
http://www.sendspace.com/file/z1cnuh
If you need to hide it from Halford's minions, try calling it the Free Grains Mix.
MY NEW FILE SHARING TECHNOLOGY IS CALLED LITTLE CHOCOLATE DONUTS
Yes! Thanks. Now I have to figure out how to make it so the songs play one after another. I am a rube at this; I think you have to create a playlist and put each of the songs in it.
No, I tag all my stuff obsessively. If you just drop it in iTunes, it will sort as an album, with the album artist = apostropher.
71, 72 -- It's gonna be so sweet when I get my revenge when the process server for the infringement lawsuit shows up at your party. No one will laugh at me then!!
You have a personal server for processed foods?
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Peter Murphy, lead singer of Bauhaus, driving a Subaru Forester around Glendale, high as a kite at 11:30 in the morning, got in a car accident.
I love this world.
|>
74: I, uh, don't have/use iTunes. Er. I have no idea how it works.
I think I should probably be embarrassed.
Another question, though: what utility do you guys favor for zipping files? I needed to compress a huge file at work recently, and whatever utility I once used is now lost, so I just used the default Windows utility, but only got 27% compression, which was not nearly enough to render the file small enough for my purposes. I was puzzled, but didn't have time to delve into alternatives.
Not all files are compressible. If it was, for instance, a PDF, or a JPEG, those file formats are already compressed, and zipping them will do little.
But maybe that's not very compressible.
In which case I'll have to take another route.
re: 79
[As you no doubt know] they [PDFs and JPEGS] can be compressed more, usually, sometimes by a lot. But yeah, zip won't do it.
re: 81
I think it probably depends on whats in the database, too. Looking at wiki, Filemaker Pro files can contain binary data as well as simple ascii text.
You could compress to multiple split files.
83.last: The most obvious alternative is to split the file into a clone (no data, no records, just the field definitions and structure), and a separate tab-delimited file of the data itself. And write a script/macro in the clone to import the data into appropriate fields with one click.
re: 84
Why would that be smaller? Unless there's something hideously inefficient about the Filemaker file format?
I suppose the tab delimited file might compress more readily.
83.1: losslessly? Not that much I wouldn't think? The random benchmarks I googled to make sure I wasn't crazy say 20% or so.
Filemaker Pro files can contain binary data as well as simple ascii text
I'm afraid I don't really understand this. There's no doubt that I have messy definitions and calculations and whatnot -- inelegant things -- which make the file larger than it probably needs to be. The flat-out data, though, is just alpha-numeric text.
If you need to split the file into smaller chunks for some reason the typical solution among enemies-of-halford would be RAR (WinRAR is a good enough client as far as I remember).
The flat-out data, though, is just alpha-numeric text.
That doesn't mean it's stored that way in the file. It might be stored in binary format, which could potentially be much smaller.
What are you actually trying to do?
85: It would be smaller because many of my fields are calculations (including auto-enter fields that piggyback off other fields), or global fields (repeating the same thing in every record). The entire database, whole, therefore has a lot of stuff in it that's really unnecessary: it's not data in itself, but is calculated from the basic data fields.
I'm not sure if that's clear, but basically a clone + a tab-delimited file of just the data would be a lot smaller.
What are you actually trying to do?
Honestly, it's sort of ridiculous: I was trying to FTP a copy of the database to our webspace for pickup by a far-off friend, but we were in the middle of a big wind- and rainstorm, so our internet connection wasn't so great, which is when I decided that there was *no way* it should be taking this long to transfer the file, so my problem must be that the file is too big (and/or troublesome internet connection).
There are any number of solutions to this, but I really was wondering what people use as a zip utility.
Hmm. For some reason I think of FTP as being old-fashioned and slow, but I haven't actually used it in, I don't know, a decade or so. Maybe you could give Dropbox a try? Not sure how it handles wind and rain.
Okay, I'll give Dropbox a try. I've always used FTP because it's the upload protocol used by online bookselling sites we upload to (though I wouldn't upload the entire database to them, obviously, just the tab-delimited data file).
re: 87
Lossy jpeg2000 would be a lot smaller than lossy jpeg for the same apparent quality. Remember, jpeg isn't a lossless format. Lossless jpeg2000 is a lot smaller than TIFF, but doesn't compete with lossy versions.
Similarly, depending on what you have in your PDF, you can do a lot by tweaking the compression on a page-by-page basis (using JBIG2 for mono pages, for example). There are third-party tools that'll re-compress PDFs, and they can make biggish improvements over what you'd get zipping a PDF.
re: 87
I've spent days and weeks at work fucking with PDFs to try and get more out of less. It's a bit of a PITA that academics expect you can email them a PDF of say a manuscript, and even more of a PITA that senior management think that should be achievable.
95: oh, sure. But just running a file through lossless whatever without other optimization is the use case I was talking about.
And yes, PDF is to academic bandwidth usage as the boston strangler is to the woman alone.
re: 98.last
Yeah.
I have [or 'my' systems have] created PDFs that are getting on for tens (even hundreds) of GB, and that even with every compression and resolution mangling trick in the book are still many hundreds of MB.
'Why can't you email me it?'
'The file is too big, it's just not do-able.'
'You people are incompetent ... [dire threats to talk to bosses, Professors, etc.'
The fact that part of your job Involves explaining to people why a system defined thirty years ago to efficiently transmitting text messages is not optimal for accurately transmitting messages in a format designed for the exact same purpose, except seven hundred years ago, by monks, is a little bit entertaining, I admit.
The fact that comment 100 got so mangled in the typing on my IPad only adds to the general hilarity.
re: 100
Heh. Exactly. I'd lay bets as to which system will still be usable in 1000 years time, too.
||?
Back to Empire are Us
The best stuff is in comments. Russia is pissed.
What has really pissed-off Russia was when, despite denials and assurances from the US state department, a meeting was held in Ankara (November 2012) with the American Ambassador to Cyprus, John Koenig, along with British, Greek and Turkey government heads. The meeting discussed a plan: British bases in Cyprus will be turned into NATO bases - the 'three-party guarantee' of Britain, Turkey and Greece will be abandoned - and NATO will take over. America wants its ships there....Claudius
The US is already in most of the former British colonial bases elsewhere. There are two in Cyprus either side of the Greek/Turkish line (Limasol/Farmagusta) and also plenty of deep harbour possibilities. The facilities would be ideal for bombing Iran.Also Syria? Which supposedly bombed Lebanon yesterday.
There is a Great Game being played in the Levant. Draw a line from Beirut to Kabul. And remember, the resources north of that line that Russia thinks it controls.
|>
Atrios sends me to his former boss:
"Christopher Pissarides, who shared a Nobel Prize in economics in 2010, told Bloomberg Businessweek in an e-mail today that he is "appalled" by Europe's plan to impose a tax on deposits in Cypriot banks to help pay for a $13 billion bailout."
"Every mature small nation has a large financial system. Malta is building its own now, after joining the Eurozone, and is benefiting from the Cyprus fallout." ...Chris Piss, as Duncan calls him
Malta has a significant British expatriate community, and much less Russian influence than Cyprus
Malta's finance minister sees hedge fund development as key part of financial services growth
Isn't this fun? Follow the moving parts
You know what? I think Germany works for Wall Street and the City, as do we all, except when we are working for energy companies.
But flunkies for Empire is what we all are.
For the record, as I glance at all the apologias and back-patting on the anniversary of the Iraq Invasion;by Ezra, MY, over at LGM, etc.
And not as a prediction, but just as a possible scenario
If a chemical weapon* is used in Tel Aviv or elsewhere this week when the Pres is there, killing many; or if a chemical weapon is used against a western target in the near term, including in the United States
I will oppose that war.
*see above, or at FDL. Apparently Libyan chemical weapons have been obtained by al Qaeda in Syria. But it could be a desperate Assad, or Hezbollah.
Whatever, if a chemical weapon gets used against a western target, it ain't gonna matter to most people where it came from or who used it but where the uncontrolled chemical weapons are.
Syria. and maybe Libya. Heck, I suppose the best route to Syria will be through Lebanon, just coincidentally mowing through Hezbollah. And Iran will be involved.
Fuck I don't know. Really. Just saying, if Yggles thinks those cuts to defense are going to hold up very long, he lacks the imagination to see how they could be rescinded. I was always expecting this, Obama the zombie Reagan, always wanted the domestic cuts and had the power to create a way (oops!) to rescind the defense cuts.
Of course, after the gaggin, pukin, and dying, I won't be welcome on any of the new new now better justified war bloggers blogs, which will be everybody.
Cause I won't be able to prove anything.
I just have what happens, and who benefits. And that is all you ever need.
Oh. What happens, who benefits, and I think
the not completely unjustified presumption that the movers and shakers of the world, the billionaires and presidents and techocrats....
....aren't fucking idiots.
All week, I have been reading especially Krugman
how could the EU and ECB be so stupid as to attack deposit insurance? Did they want a bank run in Cyprus?
Of course they did.
Stupid question: I have some Quicktime files on a portable hard drive. I have only a PC at the office. I need to get the files, which are pretty large (~6GB) to 2 different people so that they can get them to other people who will edit them. Should I just buy a couple of thumb drives? I'm confused.
[When you all were learning about computer stuff, I was arguing with stockbrokers about margin requirements, getting drunk, and watching Billy Wilder movies.]
Thumb drives are great (cf: Cuban dark sneakernet). The ones with a read-only switch are extra great.
You can probably find a cloud service w/that much free space.
