Things I’ve Seen

Things I’ve Seen is going to be taking a break over the next couple of weeks. It’s possible there might be the odd post from on the road, and normal service (whatever that is) should be resumed around 20th January. Probably with some comments on the first Democratic primaries.

Wishing all our reader(s?) a happy Christmas…

The Republican head of the 9-11 commission says that the attacks were preventable.

“This is a very, very important part of history and we’ve got to tell it right,” said Thomas Kean.

“As you read the report, you’re going to have a pretty clear idea what wasn’t done and what should have been done,” he said. “This was not something that had to happen.”

…

Asked whether we should at least know if people sitting in the decision-making spots on that critical day are still in those positions, Kean said, “Yes, the answer is yes. And we will.”

Kean promises major revelations in public testimony beginning next month from top officials in the FBI, CIA, Defense Department, National Security Agency and, maybe, President Bush and former President Clinton.

There’s discussion on this at Kos and at Dean for America. Alan has pointed out that the Sydney Olympic committee planned for a hijacked plane attack in 2000, giving the lie to the Bush administration’s pathetic ‘no one could have expected this’ (as if it hadn’t been the plot of a book, a film, and a video game as well).

Howard Dean’s foreign policy address - Fulfilling the Promise of America: Meeting The Security Challenges of the New Century

In a parallel vein to it’s the narrative, stupid comes The Narrative as Battlefield. Go read it.

The war over the ‘hearts and minds’ of the Iraqis is taking place in a vortex of information overload, with Al Jazeera and the internet fighting American efforts to tell a coherent narrative. It is this narrative that has become the main battlefield; the insurgents are fighting the perception of progress, and American coalition forces are defending it. Rather than taking battlefield events and spinning them into a favorable narrative, the narrative itself is dictating battlefield events.

I know I’m supposedly too busy to blog right at the moment, but I am prompted out of temporary retirement not by the unelectable nature of George Bush, but by Chris’ list of ‘Wow’ games. I’ve had to compile my own list.
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The google bombing of George Bush as unelectable has had the side effect of pushing Thing’s I’ve Seen’s hit rate back into the hundreds per day (instead of the 30 or 40 that we happily bob along at). It appears that for a while this page was a top 10 google result.

I’ve updated that page to include a link to the bio, as my part of the effort…

From here

Just moments after former Vice President Al Gore endorsed former Vermont Governor Howard Dean for President in Harlem yesterday, the Supreme Court overturned his endorsement by a 5-4 margin.

Billmon is back at his best in this thought provoking article. I’m not going to do it the disservice of quoting - read it.

A reader brought this story to my attention.

Good news that the electronic voting machine companies feel under pressure from public opinion. Bad news that they appear to be going into defensive mode, rather than just accept a voter verified trail.

Everyone who works in software engineering knows there is no such thing as a perfectly reliable, totally uncrackable system. Any critical system must have a independant fallback. To my mind, counting votes is a critical system in a democracy, and a voter verified printed slip placed into a locked box for recounting if required is a simple, independant, way to make sure the system does not fail, whether by reason of incompetance or of malice.

This post at Tedious Soporific got me thinking about what computer games I remembered as having that ‘wow’ factor. I made my list of 10, and found that Tedious and I have no overlap at all. Hmmmm.
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