I watched the preliminary reports of the Mars Rover landing with my 6 month-old and his bottle. My first thought was, considering achievements such as this, where would we be as a species if we did not feel it necessary to devote so many assets to our own intra-species self defense. On the brighter side, I wonder what awesome accomplishments my kids will see unfold while giving their children midnight feedings.
Lex’s Best Music of 2003
The Cutters
This has been a year dominated by work and taking care of the kids. Still, a few memorable musical items managed to get onto the radar.
Long-time readers know of my fanatical devotion to the music of Lisa Marr, (e.g.,here) formerly of Cub and Buck (and here), and currently of The Lisa Marr Experiment(a/k/a The LMX) and from time to time of the Beards. I discovered her because Kim Shattuck of the Muffs, whom my wife and I love more than almost anything, said in an interview (which I can’t find anymore …) that the only bands she liked were Cub and Buck. This set me on an internet search for what promised to be a new musical holy grail. I was not to be disappointed. I bought the Cub and Buck records for my wife for Christmas 2001. I ended up listening to them and getting into Lisa Marr’s music in the Spring of 2002. I was pretty blown away, especially by the Cub Record “Come Out, Come Out”. This led me in turn to the Beard’s unbelievably brilliant record,Funtown (and here), which was the best record of 2002, IMHO. I then bought and fell in love with the LMX’s 4 AM (and here). It was the most excited I have been about any currently active musician in years and years.
Well, Ms. Marr blessed us with a new record in 2003, called American Jitters (or here.) “Jitters” is a very good record, with several excellent songs (especially “Niagara, Niagara”, “Monday Morning, Echo Park”, “Slaughterhouse Ceiling”), and one brilliant one (“The Boy With the Lou Reed Eyes”). (Full disclosure: several of the songs are by the guitar player, and I do not think they are in the same league as Ms. Marr’s songs.) Nonetheless, this is a very good record, certainly worth buying. (If you are not familiar with her music, I’d say start with Funtown (which has seven out of eleven songs by her, four by Kim Shattuck), and then 4 A.M. which has several positively brilliant songs.)
Intelligence And Law Enforcement: Stewart Baker Gets It Half Right
Instapundit links to a thoughtful article by Stewart Baker about the underlying causes of U.S. pre-September 11 intelligence failures.
Baker is right that there should be more cooperation between intelligence people and law enforcement people, and that increased after-the-fact auditing of law-enforcement activity is probably better than increased a priori regulation.
However, he is only partially correct in his explanation of why the “effort to build information technology tools to find terrorists has stalled.” While it’s true that civil libertarians have hamstrung government efforts to deploy such tools, they have done so mainly for good reasons. Widely discussed information analysis proposals have been badly conceived: mining error-filled credit and financial databases is certain to produce a huge number of false positives, all of which must be evaluated. These proposals also appear to be designed, at least in part, to satisfy various old bureaucratic agendas. (Where have we read this before?)
Civil libertarian skepticism about the government’s anti-terror analysis proposals parallels popular skepticism about airport security. In both of these areas government tends to favor ineffective and intrusive conventional solutions, and LE/intelligence pork barreling, over politically difficult courses of action (air passenger profiling; firing failed FBI and CIA decision makers) that go to the heart of the issue.
While some of the opposition to the TIA program etc. has been overwrought or politically motivated, much opposition appears to originate out of sincere concern about the poor quality of the government’s proposals. I think we are more likely to make progress in this area if the Administration’s backers admit that this is the case, and encourage the government to improve its proposals, rather than continuing to try and deflect blame onto the critics.
New Year’s Eve
I was across the street at a party. Neighbors. Karaoke. Three beers. Unseasonably mild weather, some of the guys smoking cigars on the porch. Kids upstairs watching some damnable cartoon movie on video. My wife sang about 23 songs — “Once Bitten Twice Shy,” “Space Oddity,” “Tracks of My Tears,” “All My Exes Live in Texas,” etc. She is the queen of karaoke. I just sang Merle’s “Swingin’ Doors,” and a duet on “Fightin’ Side of Me.” Our two year old was walking into furniture she was so tired, and had defecated in her diaper. Time to bring her home. I got her cleaned up, pajamaed, she said her prayers in repeat-after-me fashion (she can say “trespasses”), and she was instantly out like a light.
Being some kind of junkie blog addict, I had to turn on the machine. Some people are wearing tuxedos and drinking champagne right now. I’m standing in my kitchen in my socks, doing this. Hey, it’s a big world. There’s room for all of us.
It’s about 11:31 here, and this year of grace 2003 is dribbling its final grains of sand into the big hourglass. A good time to wish all of you a healthy, happy, safe and prosperous 2004. Predictions for ’04 and “Best Ofs” for ’03, time permitting in the next few days. For now, one forecast: ’04 will be good year. Lots for the Boyz to kvetch about. Count on it. See y’all next year.
So If There Weren’t Any Iraqi WMD Programs …
What can this possibly be about? Whaddaya know, turns out that “more than a thousand [Iraqi] Ph.D.’s were trained in the black arts of making nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.” Now we’re going to spend $22 million giving them non-WMD work.
It may be glorified welfare — a similar program for Russian scientists “has yet to develop a single commercial product” after eleven years — but the concept of redirection training is sound. I note that $22 million over 2 years would employ only about 50-60 Americans at high-tech labor-market rates, but presumably could pay 10-20 times that many Iraqis a comfortable salary by regional standards.