Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:55 PM

As seen in Avram Grumer's LiveJournal:

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:30 PM

Spent a lovely afternoon with our friends Ben & Jen (and briefly with Rich as well) sometimes talking about current events and other times talking about other things as a diversion from current events. A good time was had by all, I believe. I picked up a copy of Douglas Adams Starship Titanic game from a remainder table for eight bucks. I nearly blew up the ship once, and found my room, but can't seem to do anything useful yet. If anybody has played this game and can give me some hints in starting out, I'd really appreciate it.

In the big news story of the day, I have to say shame on Instapundit for politicizing the disaster so quickly.

While I know NASA has to get to the bottom of this, I not only hope that this doesn't destroy our space program, but that they send up another space shuttle when it's time to get the astronauts down from the International Space Station. I understand that they've got a Soyuz capsule up there in case of emergencies, but as Tim Kyger writes, "The rentry g-load for a Soyuz is gonna be 8 to 9 gees (versus the peak 1.5 g load during a Shuttle landing -- Story Musgrave stood UP during the entire rentry of his last Shuttle mission). I worry about their ability to get back without a lot of injury." Since he worked on the Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space, he's got some intersting and disturbing thoughts on the ramifications.

Interesting Times points out that all three big NASA disasters which resulted in loss of life -- Apollo 1, Challenger, and now Columbia -- they all happened within the same week. (Jan 27, 1967, Jan 28, 1986, Feb 1, 2002). The latter two could be cold weather, but it's an eerie coincidence. Ian has pointed out that the 14 dead in the two space shuttle accidents include two Jews -- Ilan Ramon and Judith Resnick. He was the first Israeli and the first Jew. Eesh.

Meanwhile, of course, other ongoing news stories haven't stopped just because we're in shock.

• Diary of a Madman points out that the administration may change labor laws to eliminate overtime for some classes of workers.
• Avedon has a disturbing story about Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel's involvement in a company that "installed, programmed, and largely ran" certain voting machines -- machines that appear to be tied to elections where the results differed greatly from the exit polls, and always in favor of the Republicans. This could be big.
• Jimmy Carter isn't convinced war with Iraq is necessary, but I'll bet many warbloggers will just class him as a blame-America-first-er for commenting upon the hostility the rest of the world shows us. Here's his full statement.
• Another "oh shit" although in a lower case. A court is making it harder for the government to enforce food safety standards by questioning "government's authority to shut down meat plants"
• Oh, that's interesting! In the wake of questions about how healthy school lunches are, the New York Times compares school lunches in four nations.
• And, because laughs seem to be much needed today, I simply must quote the final sentence of this Boston Globe article on the Citgo sign: "This is my own approach to life, that nothing lasts forever except the taste of grilled asparagus and those craters on the moon."

I guess that's a good place to end it. I just hope that someday, within my lifetime, humans are once again exploring those craters on the moon. I wish I were more of a poet (and I know JMS said something brilliant and pithy about this) but our destiny goes beyond this one planet. We must explore and colonize space. Lives may be lost, but the goal is a worthy one. We should never forget that and never lose sight of our dreams.

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:15 PM

I'm in the mood for light fluffy entertainment this evening. Possibly renting the second Thin Man movie, maybe going to see Catch me if you can.

SpaceFlightNow seems to have the best news. Good essays can be found at Interesting Times, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and Instapundit. As my LJ friend Bikergeek says, "This was something I hoped never to see again in my lifetime."

Already, I see people starting to repeat the meme of recounting where they were on January 28th, 1986 -- how they heard the news about Challenger. I don't think I'm quite ready for that.

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:45 AM

I think we just lost another space shuttle.

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:40 AM

• Oof. I had read about "the (apparently wrongful) INS pick-up and detention of Brookings scholar Ejaz Haider" on Atrios, but Talking Points adds a possible new wrinkle (or two) to the story.
• Speaking of Talking Points, that's probably one of the first news blogs I read, discovering it during the 2000 election debacle. I've long said that I covet JMM's career. I may never become a well-known pundit like Marshall, but (unless he strenuously objects) I shall be compiling a subject index for his blog for my class. I hope it becomes a useful resource for all. Oh, and congratulations to Joshua Micah Marshall for his new regular column in The Hill.
• Lucky Duckies? The poorest taxpayers have the highest tax burden overall. Hopefully this will be a death knell for the 'tax the poor' meme
• Salon has a fascinating article about file sharing in music which makes the following provocative point: "Consumers don't hate movie companies, but they do hate record companies. ... Five years ago nobody gave a second thought about record companies; now they are reviled." Oh, you want to read this...
• Wow. Ann Coulter is her own parody. I couldn't quite believe it when Atrios wrote "Apparently she is capable of saying, with a straight face, that failure to clap appropriately at a State of the Union address is treason, while trading with Iraq is not." I couldn't quite believe it, so I checked the Crossfire transcripts and her most recent column. My gd, the woman's a loony. Even the guy who wrote the Anti-Coulter site has switched to broader goals because she's just too easy a target.
  I've asked this question before:

Well, I'm female, photogenic, intelligent, articulate and currently unemployed. I'm also an opinionated infovore, preferring to substantiate my opinions with research.
I don't know how well I'd do in the shoutfests that seem to substitute for televised political discourse nowadays, but if anyone is interested in an anti-Ann pundit, I can put together a portfolio...

• Atrios also points out how bloodthirsty Ashcroft is, not only insisting on execution in cases where prosecutors have decided against it, but now demanding they try to kill a "defendant who had secured a promise of life in exchange for information."
• Back to the SOTU for one more try, I like Elayne Riggs' comment, and which to second her in "requesting that in next year's SOTU speech Dubya please discuss funding research into personal jetpacks and (or leading into) personal transporter tubes." It's 2003. Where's my flying car that folds up into a suitcase?
• More on U.S. funding for Indonesia at Body and Soul. Ugh.
• Interesting Times makes a good point:

Dick Cheney says something right, though not for the reasons he thinks.


ARLINGTON, Virginia (CNN) -- Vice President Dick Cheney reiterated Thursday that the United States reserves the right to act unilaterally against Iraq, and said that U.S. efforts against terrorism could affect the "survival of civilization itself."

• And amen to his rant that It really pisses me off when "the other side", rather than argue with you on the facts, would rather disparage your motives and cast you into the pot with the worst of the worst. It is a form of intellectual cowardice. "Oh, I can't spend the time necessary to dispute your points. So I'm going to just dismiss you as a deluded fool." Amen also to his post on making sure a solution will actually improve matters rather than just changing them.
• I wish to close this post with a link to a beautiful poem by BlueJo

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:00 AM

I'm Elisabeth Riba, Lis for short. I'm 32 years old, married to a wonderful husband, and living in the Boston area. In college, I majored in Creative Writing and minored in Computer Science. I worked for Lotus for ten and a half years before being hit by layoffs last April. Now I'm finishing off my Master's degree in Library and Information Science and trying to find new work. Last summer, I wrote A Little bit about Lis which describes my interests in a bit greater detail. Poking around the rest of the website may also be informative. You can see what books I'm reading, or read my writings, or just see quotations I've found fun or inspirational.

The format of this journal has taken many twists and turns in the months since it began. At times it's been mostly personal news, right now it seems almost exclusively politics and current events. I read a lot. I like to read. And I like to share information with people. "Hey, have you seen X?" "Oh really, that reminds me of Y" and "You really ought to read Z" Unfortunately, the isolation of unemployment has cost me some of those casual encounters where I could point these out to people. So, that's what I'm using my journal for. I've always said my mind's like a steel sieve; think of me panning the web for nuggets worth reading. This isn't a terribly focused journal like librarian.net or Talking Points Memo -- my interests are far too scattered for me to narrow in on just one topic to write about. [Read the Carl Ally quote on my homepage.]

Meanwhile, I don't know why it's happening, but since the big DOS attacks this weekend, it seems like all my outgoing e-mail takes an extra 24 hours to go through. I called my ISP, who told me to email postmaster@..., but of course, I haven't heard anything back because it probably hasn't gotten thru yet. Argh. Oddly enough, incoming e-mail seems fine, which I count as odd because it has a longer path.

Now, on to the morning's news:

• Oh my Gd!! So, in December hundreds of immigrants were arrested in Los Angeles for not having their proper papers from the INS. Well, according to Atrios, the L.A. INS shredded over 90,000 pieces of incoming mail because they had such a backlog! These people deserve to be arrested!
• As seen on Atrios and Oliver Willis (a newly discovered must-read blog), members of the administration have been plotting an attack on Saddam for over four years. September 11th is just an excuse!

Rumsfeld wrote, according to a later CBS News report, that he wanted "best info fast. Judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. at the same time. Not only UBL" - meaning Osama bin Laden. He added: "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not." "S.H.," of course, is Saddam Hussein.

"This is not a war on fanatics," Ian Lustick, a University of Pennsylvania political science professor and Middle East expert, said. "This is a war of fanatics - our fanatics."

• Good stuff on Iraq from The Road to Surfdom and Joshua Micah Marshall has some interesting insight on Colin Powell.
• I really want to read Interesting Times, but it never wants to open up under Opera -- sometimes I get the page of HTML code, other times, the top banner opens and it seems to just hang not displaying anything else on the page. I see in IE that the scroll bar looks a little weird; maybe that's it. However, he does link to some good stuff I haven't seen elsewhere, like this article on Helen Thomas and this quote about the recent anti-war demonstrations:

[D]espite the fact that it was comprised of largely middle- to upper-middle class whites, there was no name politician from either major party there to address it. Given that a Pew survey taken this week showed that a majority of Americans (52%) felt that President Bush had not yet made a convincing case that war was necessary, one would have thought that at least some opportunistic politician from the Democratic party would have decided to attach his name to the anti-war effort.
...
Put two and two together and what you get is the amazing realization that this crowd, perhaps the largest to gather in Washington in the last thirty years, has no political representation whatsoever in today's America. Almost certainly representing a vastly larger number of people in the general population, the anti-war crowd has simply been excluded from the process.

• Salon points out that Congressional Democrats feel caught in a Catch-22: "At the root of Democrats' problems may be polls that routinely show voters trust Republicans to keep America's national security strong, and their resulting caution compounds their division. The Democrats don't want to be labeled obstructionists, nor to be tagged as dovish multilateralists who dither in the face of conflict." So, not only are Congressional Democrats fighting amongst themselves, but they're damned by both sides.
• Librarian.net links to the helpful Bookslut tutorial How to Weed Your Bookshelves. The guidelines seem useful, though I don't think we'll be using them.
• Wired shows that at least some members of Congress grok that media consolidation (at least in radio) has not been a good thing.

Finally, I don't have a guestbook on my website, so please feel free to use my comments section to just say hi.

This just in: Atrios links to an Australian article, in which UN weapons inspector Hans Blix says Bush and Powell are lying about his report. I wonder if this has anything to do with the 8000 pages the US edited out of the report?

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:00 AM

Sigh. Yet again, I have to correct an idiot who thinks that women's sexual dysfunctions are caused by incompetent partners or mental health problems, and anyone thinking the problem could be physical is clearly manipulating women. Nyarg! I hate this. I wrote this essay nearly five years ago; why has nobody gotten the message? [I think I want to contact Salon about writing a rebuttal article rather than just another letter to the editor that'll only get buried.]

I really don't like what's happening to this country. Shock and Awe is just one small part of why. Dan Kennedy has more horrifying news about Shock and Awe. This is must read information, people. This is what our government is talking about doing in our name! And if we carry this out, if we flatten Baghdad with no thought to its civilian population, then why should anybody in the rest of the world care if somebody else does that to one of our cities?

Meanwhile, TalkLeft has some pretty scary stories about our court system, including a man sentenced to 205 years in federal prison for murders a jury found he did not commit and a woman convicted of killing her stillborn baby by using crack cocaine and sentenced to twelve years in jail. Eesh.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden asks "Why would anyone possibly worry about the fact that every time we turn around another prominent Administration member turns out to be up to his ass in business connections with shadowy Al-Qaeda supporters?" And that's not even including the old news that the commission investigating 9/11 is getting less funding and time than one on legalized gambling -- not to mention less than 1/20th what was spent investigating who Clinton slept with.

I haven't heard the story anywhere else, but Geov Parrish reports that "Last Thursday, at Bush Administration urging, the newly Republican-controlled Senate voted to lift existing restrictions on selling American weaponry to Indonesia."

As seen on This Modern World, Don't call Bush conservative! "Real conservatives promote fiscal prudence, public accountability and limited government." Howard Kurtz also points this out, noting that if a Democratic president made such proposals, he'd be royally abused for fiscal irresponsibility.

And here are some more numbers, financial and statistical. I like what my friend Yehoshua has to say, as well.

Tom Tomorrow also points out some quotes worthy of co-opting. I have two replies. After September 11th, Ian was reminded that Margaret Mead's famous quote "Never doubt that a small group of dedicated individuals can change the world... indeed, it's the only thing that ever has" isn't necessarily a positive statement. And, when I just showed Ian the TMW quotes, he mentioned a desire for a bumper sticker which reads "Regime Change Begins At Home."

Glad to see somebody else noticed that this GOP plan to increase minority staffs is the kind of racial preferences they otherwise decry. Just like I pointed out yesterday

Finally, an important lesson. When in the future you hear about a company called Altria, they're really speaking about Philip Morris. They're changing their name to something with positive connotations (sounds like altruism, no?) But don't be fooled.

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:25 AM

I'm not going to talk much about the State of the Union speech, because, well, I couldn't bear to listen to it. I tried, but shut the radio off in less than ten minutes.

Last night, Ian and I drove down to the Cambridge Public Library - he to continue reading the Miles Vorkosigan series, me to pick up two recent books that were finally in and being held for me. I realized with amusement that I checked out books of two different genres that both feature William Shakespeare as protaganist. Harry Turtledove's alternate history Ruled Britannia and Simon Hawke's mystery Much ado about murder. I've started the Turtledove and Wow, it's good! I'm only about three chapters into it, and the attention to detail is amazing. I've read a lot about the period, both fiction and non, and I keep experiencing the delight of he's not making that up!

Afterwards, we went to Sushi Corner in Melrose for dinner. I really cannot recommend this restaurant highly enough. Although we didn't order this, they have a weekday all you can eat sushi for $19.95 for lunch, and $24.95 for dinner. And the quality of the food really is divine. The place doesn't get too much traffic most times we've been there, so you can get personal attention from the chef. [But tonight might not be the best time to discover the place, since there's a group outing planned for tonight.

Anyway, on to the news.

• As I mentioned, I didn't listen to the SOTU, but fortunately other bloggers and journalists did. For some good spot analysis, check out Oliver Willis, DailyKOS and William Saleton. A poster on Slate's Fray makes a good point about the fuzzy math in Bush's AIDS plan.
• Ooh, yay! According to Interesting Times, "Sen. Edward Kennedy will introduce a measure requiring President Bush to get new congressional approval before launching a military strike on Iraq." Way to go! We owe Kennedy our thanks twice over this month, at least. Now if we could only get the President to stop calling our current state war until he gets a Declaration...
• So, why is it okay for Congressional Republicans to focus on hiring more minorities for their staffs, but affirmative action at colleges is wrong? [And yet, something Bush calls affirmative access is, in his words, "a smart thing to do."]
• Salon has more bad news on TIA -- it's not dead yet!
• I've always liked Clay Bennett's cartoons, since I was a young teen living in Clearwater, and he drew for the St. Petersburg Times. I'm so glad the Christian Science Monitor lured him to their paper -- the Christian Science Monitor is worth reading daily anyway, but the cartoon is definitely an added incentive. This is a really long windup to say that I found today's cartoon particularly funny.
• And speaking of much-needed laughter, Neil Gaiman's post from 8:09 PM Tuesday (sorry, no permalinks, but right now it's the most recent entry) is quite amusing.
• Oh, since I mentioned Oregon's Measure 28 yesterday, I suppose I ought to do the responsible thing and say that it failed, 55 to 45. So, the state will be slashing its budgets rather than raising taxes temporarily.
• Finally, who should be the patron saint of the Internet? A Roman Catholic site is holding a poll on the matter.

Oh, and a grumble to Blogger whose servers were down for the last half-hour since I finished this post. And then crashed after I posted it, meaning I have to re-submit it again. [Fortunately, I write these things in NoteTab, so I didn't lose anything but time and patience.]

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:10 PM

Whoops, when I finished my previous post, I forgot about one tidbit of even more disturbing news that I read last night:

In rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated, J. Michael Straczynski wrote (excerpted):

[Karl Rove] tells Bruce [Boxleitner], "I just wanted to tell you that I'm a big science fiction fan, and that Babylon 5 is the best science fiction television series *ever*."

Then there's a pause, and he adds....

"And the President thinks so too."

Oh, weird.

Then again, if Bush & Rove like B5 so much, why are they repeating President Clark's strategies? I'd suggest we send them a copy of the episodes on the Nightwatch, but I think that's where they got their idea for the TIPS Program. This 1996 post by JMS seems particularly apt.

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:40 AM

Class went well last night. Looks like it's going to be fun, although a tremendous amount of hard work. I knew that going in, though. My assignment for this week is to figure out just what I'm going to index.

After some slight snafus in finding the phone number to Mystery House, Ian met me as I got off the train, and we went back to play a really cut-throat game of Munchkin (everybody was at level 9 for at least two full rounds). They were all happy to see me; we hung out and talked for a while, Teddywolf fed me some yummy dinner, and we didn't get home about 12:30 AM.

Needless to say, today has gotten off to a slow start. <Yawn> So, let's see what the morning news has to say:

• Hmm. Ari Fleischer, unnamed source : "If you're interested, I'll be happy to go on background and discuss more data with you." The White House enjoys having it both ways. I know that reporters have a reputation for maintaining the secrecy of their sources, but I don't like seeing it so misused. I wish that when "administration officials" lie to the press and public, that the reporters would expose those liars for what they are. Is it really hurting the search for sources to say, "don't use me by feeding me false slanted information"?
  PS: Here's more on the Condoleezza Rice story from the Washington Post's ombudsman.
• This is interesting. I hadn't been following Oregon's ballot measure 28, but even this tax-averse state appears tied whether to raise taxes or cut services. I wonder what the Libertarians think of that? And what a great FDResque line from the governor: "We will neither surrender to our fears nor surrender to the illusion that there is an easy and painless way to balance the budget. There isn't." I'm really curious how this one turns out.
• As Kausfiles points out, Janeane Garofalo isn't the only one not yet convinced of the need for war with Iraq. Stalwart Republicans Peggy Noonan and Norman Schwarzkopf still aren't on board
• And as long as tonight is the State of the Union, has anybody heard anything about who was responsible for the anthrax attacks a year and a half ago?
• Patrick Nielsen Hayden has too much worthwhile reading on his blog for me to link to every individual item. Go read it!
• For something really disturbing, take a look at this: "when Iraq released its weapons program dossier on 7 December 2002, it was purloined by the US Administration, edited of 8,000 pages, and it was this edited copy that was finally given to the UN for examination." Before the UN could read the report, the US edited out "the names of various Western companies and government agencies who have supplied Iraq with assistance with their weapons program." And next-to-no US newspapers have reported on this, but you can read the list for yourself via Tin Dunlop's Road to Surfdom. [As seen in Teresa Nielsen Hayden's journal]
  Noticed slightly later, Ari Fleicher treats any questioning of these facts as "blaming America" and "beyond the pale."
• Odd thought. Today's New York Times reports on the increasing debt of recent college graduates -- not consumer debt, but college loans. Although the article doesn't say this and I'm not an economist, if this debt is preventing recent grads from buying houses or making other big-ticket items, could this be having a significant impact on the economy? If increased consumer confidence and spending are supposed to boost the economy, then reducing the discretionary income of twenty-somethings and making them increasingly worried about their indebtedness can't be helping, can it?
• Speaking of education, here's a weird one from the Washington Post. Do you know why high school science is traditionally taught with biology first? "Nineteenth-century educators ... believed that adolescents could be lured into a science course that would explain their hormonal urges, while chemistry and physics were harder sells." Sounds somewhat apocryphal, but an amusing story nonetheless.

Finally: Oh my gd. In an article about the excesses and restraint of reality TV, the Christian Science Monitor writes:

There are some dark corners of the unscripted genre that may never make it into the light of mainstream TV, despite a loyal audience, says another producer who has had people pitch the idea of airing fights in prisons. A variation of this theme called "Bum Fights," already has a thriving following on the Internet. "This is where they get these bums to fight each other for money and booze," he says, "it gets pretty raw, pretty fast."

In response, I would like to quote from Kyle Baker's 1988 comic masterpiece, The Cowboy Wally Show:

I got some shows I'm working on. Like "Cowboy Wally's Fighting Irish."
     What's it about?
Every week, we get two Irishmen in a ring and let them beat each other up.

I'm familiar with the adage that "Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense." Still, I think I'll just close on this note, because I'm just too disturbed to look at anything more.

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:10 PM

Thanks to Dan Kennedy for pointing out this excellent Boston Herald story on the MCAS. A few excerpts:

Question One: If school systems are facing teacher layoffs and shorter school days because of budget cuts, what purpose does the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System continue to serve?
...
Typical Massachusetts government. Raise the bar, then pull out the rug.
...
And it defies logic to think a single standardized test is the final word on anything.
High standards are a good thing. Schools should perform. But you can't have a level playing field when you take away the bats, balls and gloves in the middle of the game.
...
If the governor truly wants to do something bold, he will revisit MCAS and ask, honestly, whether it is realistic to pump resources into a single and expensive high-stakes test at the expense of overall educational quality.

As I've said again and again, putting students through high-stakes testing without providing adequate support to help them pass is a rigged game. After we cheat our schools of what they need to succeed, their failures can be used to denegrate the entire public school system, thus justifying sucking further moneys from our public schools to feed voucher programs to private schools.

Rather than enriching the test companies, let's spend our school money where it's really needed, such as adequate facilities, supplies and salaries sufficient to attract and retain qualified teachers in our public schools.

Posted by Lis Riba at 2:15 PM

Oh, this is cool! You Are Where You Live -- enter a zip code and uncover the marketing demographics for that neighborhood. How well do you know your neighbors?

I had a dream the other night that instead of talking about invading Iraq, the U.S. was on the verge of invading Czechoslavakia, and while Europe wasn't happy about it, they would let us take that country, but if we attacked anyplace else, they'd fight us over it. I didn't want to delve into the parallels or lack thereof, but I do find it very disturbing that most of Europe considers us to be the rogue nation.

Therefore, brava to Janeane Garofalo for speaking out politically and intelligently. [The full transcript is also worth reading.]

And bravo to Atrios for pointing out the ludicrousness of Republicans attempts to equate "Critcism of the president's failure to fund the programs he touted as being crucial for Homeland Security [with] inviting our enemies to attack."

For an educational look at presidential approval polls, take a look at PollKatz. He aggregates the results from about fifteen of the biggest polling organizations, giving a more detailed look at how Bush is actually doing. You can compare Bush's standing with those of the last five two-term presidents. And take a look at this map showing most "Bush states" receive more pork than they spend in taxes. Bush got a massive boost from 9/11, but it's been a steady slide since then. And for all the talk of Reagan's amazing publicity, Atrios points out that Reagan & Clinton are quite balanced until "about 5 1/2 years in, when Reagan's drop substantially and Clinton's surge."

FWIW, I did watch some of the Super Bowl ads this morning. Enh. The HotJobs one is really depressing. Given how advertisers and broadcasters apparently hate TIVO and claim that skipping commercials is theft, I wonder how they feel about the number of people who TIVO'd the Super Bowl to watch the ads while skipping the game? Hmm. I notice in Wired that the same thing happened last year.

Salon had an interesting comment about the anti-marijuana ads (which I haven't seen, but read plenty about): "The current anti-marijuana campaign focuses on the connection between pot- smoking, date rape and teen pregnancy. It's really weird ... like they got the stoners mixed up with the football players and pot confused with beer." I really don't like these ads (or the earlier ones from last Super Bowl). I don't like the extremism, I don't like lying to kids. Because kids will see through these things, making them utterly ineffective. [Teaching kids to be skeptical is a good thing, but it would be nice if we could promote skepticism without cynicism.] Their previous ad, blaming rape victims for being assaulted, was downright offensive. [Several months ago, one of my Livejournal friends wrote a letter to them about this issue; I wish I could find the post.]

At any rate, I'm starting my final course tonight. A baker's dozen of class sessions (and probably a boatload of classwork) and I'll earn my Master's Degree.

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:15 AM

So when did the Bucs become a good team? I used to live in the Tampa Bay area, and I remember them being nothing more than jokes. Aha. This article from the St. Pete Times gives the sordid history (20-0 debut, 26-0 record!?).

Here's an interesting tidbit on job creation in the Bush stimulus plan. It seems that the ten year, $674 billion economic stimulus proposal, will create only 190,000 jobs in 2003, and "a couple million jobs" over the ten years. Given 1.5 million jobs have disappeared in the last couple years, that's pretty embarrassing -- and expensive. Needless to say, the plan has mysteriously disappeared off the White House website. Hmmm

I've seen several blogs review Axle of Evil, a review of a new book on SUVs. So, I finally read it last night. [Fine, I'm behind the curve.] Eye-opening, yet entirely unsurprising. As Dan Kennedy writes, it may be unnecessary to get the book after reading this piece.

Okay, I'm quite happy having my (our) own .org domain, but anybody want to be a .mil? Apparently, they're really easy to get!

The following letter appeared in the January 11th Boston Globe:

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:15 PM

I love my husband. Not only did he bake cookies for me today (sugar cookies with cream cheese frosting), he taught me how to open a can without having to show the contents to a begging cat. The secret is to sing loudly and lustily while opening the can. Boopsie may have heard us singing "Pineapple, pineapple, pineapple," but she obviously didn't hear the can opener, because she was still sitting on the bed once it was opened.

Interesting meme seen on Bluejo's LiveJournal: first lines from favorite books. Let's try a few, alphabetical by author:

• "We slept in what had once been the gymnasium." The Handmaid's tale by Margaret Atwood
• "Even in high summer, Tintagel was a haunted place; Igraine, Lady of Duke Gorlois, looked out over the sea from the headland." The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
• "By day, the Nicollet Mall winds through Minneapolis like a paved canal." War for the oaks by Emma Bull (Thanks to Darius Bacon for the quote!)
• "I'm ten years old, my whole life you've called me Vanya." Enchantment by Orson Scott Card
• "Good morning, Liana. You have a visitor." A Distant soil by Colleen Doran
• "Current theories on the creation of the Universe state that, if it was created at all and didn't just start, as it were, unofficially, it came into being between ten and twenty thousand million years ago." Good omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
• "When the procession reached the edge of the volcano, the thief abandoned all dignity and began to scream." The Fire's stone by Tanya Huff
• "Mother, I am in love with a robot." The Silver metal lover by Tanith Lee
• "She had put away mirrors some years before, preferring to see herself reflected in the words of the young men who still thronged her court." The Armor of light by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett
• This entry purposely blank for future books I may discover

Mind you, this is completely off-the-cuff. I've never been very good with favorite lists, because they're so heavily influenced by whatever I read most recently. Still, it's an interesting experiment.

Speaking of fun reading, Arts & Letters Daily links to several good articles on PowerPoint and how its influence is changing our society. I didn't realize that it was being used as early as elementary and even pre-k schools nowadays. As Sherry Turkle says, "PowerPoint doesn't teach children to make an argument. It teaches them to make a point, which is quite a different thing. It encourages presentation, not conversation. Students grow accustomed to not being challenged. A strong presentation is designed to close down debate, rather than open it up." As Thomas Stewart wrote in Fortune magazine, "Never put more than three bullet points on a PowerPoint slide, experts say. It confuses people. Keep it simple. You know, the way life is."

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:00 PM

• Bravo to Gary Hart. "The ideals of democracy are not marketed: They are lived." What an inspiring statement. Between this, Ted Kennedy's recent speech (highlights here), and the recent rise of Democratic presidential candidates, hopefully we'll see some more outspokenness against Bush policies, outside the blogosphere.
• Ian had a good point about my previous entry. What does it say about our country that we're even having an argument over whether torture is acceptable?
• Dan Kennedy questions the suspicious timing of leaks of sealed court records against Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector and critic of current policies. We may not condone what he did, but who leaked the records at such a propitious time?
• GM food doesn't get a lot of discussion over here. But it is a major issue worldwide. In my Corporate Libraries class, we watched Frontline/Nova: Harvest of Fear, which I strongly recommend to everyone as a good overview of the debate. Not only hasn't the rest of the world been as blase about GM food as the US, but they've been downright resistant. So much so that the Bush administration is thinking of filing a case with the WTO against the European Union. In the New York Times, a former Reagan administration trade hawk argues that this could be counterproductive -- we might win the case but lose the war.

I'm reminded of an article I read a while back (can't remember when or where) which stated that over the last fifty years, we've gotten used to thinking of multinational cooperation as the default state. We forget how much hard work went into getting the United Nations to work. If we don't nurture or actively spurn multinational cooperation, it will fall apart again. The Bush administration's "my way or the highway" approach, rejecting treaties and pushing other issues like Iraq, is turning off our allies.

Our government has not made the world safer for Americans since September 11th. They've made it more dangerous. The recent State Department advisory, telling Americans living abroad to be prepared for emergency evacuations doesn't inspire much confidence.

I don't think we've done a good job yet at rebuilding Afghanistan to prevent another flareup from that region. [Anybody remember Afghanistan? Things aren't going so well in that country.] I don't believe we're ready for the decades-long investment we'll need to take to rebuild Iraq should we succeed in our euphemistic "regime change." [It deeply disturbs me that I've seen better plans to care for their oil wells, than for the populace.] Bombing innocent Iraqis will spread seeds of resentment across the region, that will only sprout further anti-American attacks over the next half-century. I am so pissed off at George W. Bush for squandering our future in this manner.

Going back to the Gary Hart speech with which I began, "The United States military does not belong to the president; it belongs to the American people." Maybe we ought to remind our elected officials of that fact.

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:45 PM

I don't know whether it's the weather or low-level depression, but I feel like I'm starting to hibernate. I'm going to bed much earlier and waking up much later. But I have managed to read the morning papers and blogs, and found a few stories worthy of wider distribution:

I guess there must be a blue moon, because once again, I find myself agreeing with Jeff Jacoby. It's such a rare thing, and JJ's so often wrong, that I often have to double-check the column and my own opinions to make sure we're both on the right side, but I think he's on target today. How not to win the war talks about how the increased airport security is a Maginot Line and why torture should not be an option we should be willing to take. Bravo.

In the New York Times Book Review, Judith Shulevitz writes about the renewed practice of sending great books to soldiers, and talks about what lessons our soldiers may be getting from one of the choices -- Shakespeare's Henry V. As she says,

One of the most satisfying things about literature, though, is the way it can turn on those who use it for self-interested reasons. The play's plotline, for instance, offers more commentary on our current situation than the Pentagon probably intended: A newly crowned king's claim to the throne is subject to grave constitutional question, since his father usurped it by murdering its previous holder. The king needs to win his people's trust; he also wants to make them forget his youth as a drunk and a bum. He does exactly that by skillfully and courageously prosecuting a war against France, just as his father told him to do: ''Be it thy course to busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels.''

This summer, Commonwealth Shakespeare put on a production of Henry V which tried to emphasize just these parallels.

And, just so there's no doubt about what this war is about, the front page of today's Boston Globe has an article, Planning underway to manage Iraqi oil (right underneath the larger article, US entering 'last phase' before war)

Making the rounds of the blogosphere is this primer on recognizing propaganda. Josh Marshall and Atrios remark upon the subtle racism of pundits who discount the black vote as somehow irrelevant or inferior, as if winning the white vote is all that counts. Oh, and though I already knew this from Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, Adam Felbers writes really funny blog. I can't point to any specific post of his, but he's worth reading.

On the library front, the AP is reporting that librarians are alarmed by the USA PATRIOT Act. Well, duh! Reread what I wrote back in July! Meanwhile, budget cuts mean that libraries may not be able to afford suffient copies of the new Harry Potter book. When Book 4 came out, Ian and I bought two copies on opening night, and donated one anonymously to the public library. I suspect we'll do the same this year, and I wish to encourage others to do similarly.

Speaking of books, I recently discovered there's a LiveJournal community called 50bookchallenge for people who somehow consider it a challenge to read 50 books in a year. I'm trying not to be directly snide to them, but, um, I read 173 books in 2002. So far in 2003, I've only finished 8, but I've been readng more fanfic which are often ongoing efforts and don't have the conclusions (or length) I require to put on my list. A book a week is a reasonable goal, but I'm not sure it's as worthy of a community and cheering efforts as, say, NaNoWriMo.

And, that's about it for now. [BTW, for those wondering whether the RSS feed would change my posting style, I did actually have trouble with the title and opening paragraph, feeling a need to put something in there to indicate that the contents of this post covered more than just my morning routine.]