Category: Historical

I want to put this on record. I do not much care for coffee-flavored ice cream.

I have now created a project for myself. I intend to automate the collection of first class availability data from airlines to build a reference site to determine the potential upgrade opportunities on a given route. This little project has me quite excited, as I’m playing with fun technologies and it presents a void in my airline booking process. If I’m nice, I may even provide this as a publically available web site. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Today I finally had the opportunity to relax in the evening. Friday, I ended up working nearly 11 hours on a production release at work that didn’t complete successfully. This led to several hours of work over the weekend, combined with an early morning start (i.e. working from home as early as 6 a.m.) Monday and an additional production issue that took all morning to resolve. Follow that up with an entanglement with another group’s issue during the afternoon, which led to another late night on Tuesday (until about 8:30 PM, a full 12-hour day), and my this morning, I was exhausted. Then throw in to that mix the fact that we moved our cubicles down to the first floor of our building this morning, and I was very stressed out.

Leaving shortly after 5 never felt so good, and taking a nap certainly was refreshing. Now I just wish it was Friday already.

I’ve read and heard a lot of complaints about the CIA in the whole “speech-gate”/Bush lies issue that has sprung to life (thankfully!) recently. Unfortunately, the impression I’ve received is that the White House pressured the CIA to include and support this kind of evidence, not the other way around. For instance, the Boston Globe today writes

Even as the CIA found little to verify the reports, Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to put them into public statements. Sometimes CIA succeeded in getting the information removed.

For instance, the agency tried to have the Niger reference removed from a State Department fact sheet in December 2002, but the document was published before the change could be made, one U.S. intelligence official told The Associated Press, speaking only on condition of anonymity.

This isn’t the view of a CIA that was inept, but an Administration, clearly led directly bu Bush, pushing evidence that was almost certainly fabricated to support their flismy argument for directly invading another sovereign nation without any real provocation. My only hope is that this fire continues to simmer…

More Bush Lies… This guy is more slippery than Clinton!

Someone else beat me to another of my ideas…

I finally heard it–“speech-gate”. Slate picks up the cause with two articles, here and here.

I look at this as a simple act of comparitive hypocrisy. During the Clinton impeachment scandal, Clinton was derided repeatedly for lying about the nature of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. This nearly led to his impeachment. Bush, on the other hand, fudges some facts, trots out a similarly weak defense, and everyone is supposed to roll over. From the details, it appears to be clear that at least some of the White House staff, if not all, were aware of the false nature of the reports, yet they included it anyway. William Saletan writes the following:

It’s also now OK to hedge your language just enough to avoid clear falsehood. According to Tenet, CIA “officials who were reviewing the draft remarks on uranium raised several concerns about the fragmentary nature of the intelligence with National Security Council colleagues. Some of the language was changed.”

It makes you wonder what else this administration is fudging, like, say, the estimates for the Iraqi reconstruction project, or the real beneficiaries of the tax cuts?

I found this site the other day regarding CO2 emissions and the upcoming implementation of the Kyoto Protocol regarding the reduction of CO2 emissions around the world (with the exception of the unilateralist United States).

The idea of trading emissions credits strikes me as one of the best market-based ideas to reduce pollution. This presents a wonderful carrot and stick approach, by capping emissions by all groups, but by creating a method to reward those who volutnarily reduce their emissions below the mandated caps by enabling them to trade their quotas to other producers.

In fact, I would argue that once such a system has been implemented, it would be worthwhile for governments to, over time, step in to those markets to buy off existing credits on a permanent basis, thus forcing the worldwide caps even lower. Since those credits would no longer be in the market, the overall emissions caps would be lowered using the laws of supply and demand, not through regulation. Now what Republican couldn’t agree with harnessing the powers of capitalism in order to reduce environmental pollution?

My computer has been running now since April 5th or thereabouts, bringing my up time to 13 weeks, 5 days, 21 hours, and 57 minutes…

A scathing critique of the Bush Administration appears in the Washington Post.

An MSNBC commentary argues there are signs of life again in the Democratic Party, which would be welcome news. I’m not sure that “tacking left” is necessarily going to win national elections, but at least having a platform of ideas (to quote an overused buzz-phrase) would be a start.