23. november 2003

Mayor cancels UFO landing because of football game Elcio Berti, the mayor of the Brazilian town of Bocaiuva do Sul, appears to be a colourful character (btw, that is an euphemism for 'crazy'). He claims to speak to extra-terrestrial aliens regularly, and wants his town to build an UFO landing pad for them. He may talk to the aliens, but he obviously doesn't trust them too much. Recently he cancelled a planned UFO landing because there was an upcoming football (soccer) game between Brazil and Peru, and he was worried the aliens would abduct one of the Brazilian stars. That, mind you, would be a national disaster of cosmic proportions. But how does a mayor of a small town cancel a planned UFO landing? Do we really want to know? 10:45:07 PM    comment []  trackback []

More about Clark Presidential hopeful general Wesley Clark is not easy to pigeonhole, as a number of articles about him in the press make obvious. Clark is obviously a complex man with an interesting background, highly intelligent and capable of success in difficult jobs, but also one who is surrounded by controversy. The problem now is that to become president he has to become genuinly liked by a lot of people. I am not so sure he can pull that off. I don't see him having the charisma of, say, Howard Dean. 9:58:34 PM    comment []  trackback []

Georgian leader resigns Eduard Shevardnadze (picture), the embattered president of the former Soviet republic Georgia has officially resigned after weeks of increasing unrest. When tens of thousands of people chased him from the parliament after a fraudulent general election, and a number of military and police units declared their loyalty was with the opposition, the old comrade of the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had no choice but to resign. The US had condemned the election as fraudulent, and Russia's Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov apparently played an important role in convincing Shevardnadze to give up and, according to some reports, convincing him to leave the country for exile in Russia. Reformist Mikhail Saakashvil lead the opposition, and will now most likely take the presidency. To get legitimacy, however, he will need to hold, and win, a real election. So far, it looks like Georgia's "velvet revolution" lives up to its name. But as in all revolutions, the real work starts after the opposition gets the power. It will be important that the opposition at least remains united for keeping the country on track for reforms and real democracy. 6:36:16 PM    comment []  trackback []

Study: FBI bullet analysis flawed In a still unreleased report, the National Academy of Sciences has concluded that a technique that has been used by the FBI to compare bullets for decades may be deeply flawed. In situations where ballistic evidence cannot be used to link a bullet to a specific gun, the FBI has in numerous court cases said that their chemical methods can indentify bullets from the same lead batch, thus linking two different bullets. There has been growing criticism of this method over the years, and now a major study seems to point out that key methods are scientifically flawed. There are already claims that maybe hundreds of innocents have been put behind bars by this unsound methodology, but that is yet to be substantiated on a case-by-case basis. Defence lawyers will have a field day. 4:14:32 PM    comment []  trackback []

The rumours of our deaths are slightly exaggarated The man who always has strong opinions about technology, John C. Dvorak, has proclaimed the blogsphere a short-lived fad that will die, from bloggers' boredom and from being co-opted by the traditional big media. Dvorak has two arguments: One, the famous Perseus paper which showed the high mortality rate of weblogs, and the low popularity of most of them. Second, the trend towards blogging in the big media. Blogging, he thinks, will be co-opted by the big media types. Dvorak is, I think, wrong. Personal home pages (of which blogs are arguably a natural evolution) has also had a massive extinction rate. Personal home pages are rarely updated, they disappear when people stop paying for the domain, and few of them attract any serious readership. But they aren't dead. A small minority keep updating them, even of those that don't evolve into blogs, and some contain quality articles that are crosslinked across the world. Contrary to Dvorak, I think the death rate among bloggers is a strength. First, many even successful blogs are eventually abandoned when the creator moves on. The mourning readership still moves on, to other blogs. Second, blogs die because many people tried blogging, and decided it was not for them. It is like any other activity in life. How many people have at one stage had a golf club membership, or a card at the local gym, but have stopped going? Trying something, finding it not for them, and moving on is a deeply human thing. Those who persist, enjoy it, obtain a readership. The massive extinction rate strengthens, not weakens, the blogsphere. I also don't see traditional media types blogging any threat to the "rank & files" in the blogsphere. Sure, they use reverse chronology posting, they update when they like, they may or may not have an reduced editing process. They call it blogs. But their presence is not a threat to the "real" blogs of amateurs. People read traditional newspapers, big media columnists turned bloggers, and 'amateur' blogs. They will continue doing all this, as long as interesting blogs exist for them to read. I don't conceive that opiniated people will stop posting their ideas on the web. I don't see how Dvorak can be right that people will stop making blogs, or reading blogs. 1:22:13 PM    comment []  trackback []

New and old conservatives fight over Iraq war I recently wrote about neocon journal Weekly Standard leak of the Saddam-al Qaeda link memo. The old conservatives in the The New Republic will not be outdone, and an article about vice-president Dick Cheney, essentially giving a voice to the CIA to criticise the neocons and Cheney in particular for overriding sound skepticism and forming a separate intelligence group and an OVP that worked as a de facto shadow National Security Council. This shadow government, which came to run the aggressive US foreign policy and especially the justifications for the war on Iraq, relied heavily on Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress (INC). The OVP never considered that it could be wrong, despite the fact that none of its senior members had intelligence training. The CIA, on the other hand, rather than behaving as a rigid and unshakable bastion of unquestionable truth, subjected its judgments to rigorous criticism. On Iraq, the CIA had what is known as the "red cell," a team of four highly regarded retired analysts who conducted alternative assessments of Iraq's ties to terrorism. The OVP, by contrast, put its judgments through no comparable wringer. Perhaps that is why so much of what they embraced was wrong. On the ground in Iraq today, there is no evidence that Saddam reconstituted his nuclear weapons program; according to chief American arms-hunter David Kay's interim report, the evidence of any ongoing chemical or biological weapons programs is fragmentary at best. A classified study prepared by the National Intelligence Council in early 2003 found that only one of Chalabi's defectors could be considered credible, The New Republic has learned. A more recent investigation undertaken by the DIA has found that practically all the intelligence provided by the INC was worthless.  This is essentially a conservative ideological turf war within the Bush administration and the greater intelligence and military community. The CIA came away from 9/11 with its reputation badly bruised. The neocons considered them naive, and refused to accept cautionary arguments from Langley about Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda links. With no real WMDs found, the CIA considers it deeply unfair that they are blamed for the failure, considering they were deeply critical of a lot of claims made by the Bush administration to begin with. They blame Dick Cheney for having bypassed normal sober intelligence procedures to get the results he already "knew" to be correct. 12:24:45 PM    comment []  trackback []

© Copyright 2003 Jan Haugland. Last update: 01.12.2003; 12:14:21.