Subterranean Homepage News

February 10, 2004, 7:00 p.m. -- (Last week's weblog)

There will probably not be a blog tomorrow. Projo.com is changing again -- new colors and an elastic design that will allegedly fit everything on your screen no matter how wide or narrow you choose to make it. I'll be converting pages tomorrow night. If all goes well, I might eke out an item or two.

Columnist "got paid for all the National Guard meetings I missed": Richard Cohen wrote a timely column in the Washington Post today about his time in the National Guard during the Vietnam era:

I was supposed to attend weekly drills and summer camp, but I found them inconvenient. I "moved" to California and then "moved" back to New York, establishing a confusing paper trail that led, really, nowhere. For two years or so, I played a perfectly legal form of hooky. To show you what a mess the Guard was at the time, I even got paid for all the meetings I missed.

Those in the White House who read newspapers must have cringed when they saw the column. Press Secretary Scott McClellan was apparently not among them, as he misunderstood a reporter who was trying to deliver the message from Cohen's column:

QUESTION: Scott, those payroll records won't reflect whether he (President Bush) actually appeared for duty; is that right? I mean, they'll just show that he got paid, which there was an --

MR. McCLELLAN: You are paid for the days on which you serve in the National Guard --

QUESTION: But there was an --

MR. McCLELLAN: -- that's why I said these records clearly document that the President fulfilled his duties.

QUESTION: Well, there was an opinion piece in the Post this morning in which the author said he didn't show up at all and he continued to get paid for several months.

MR. McCLELLAN: I think the records clearly document otherwise.

McClellan seems to have miscontrued "the author said he didn't show up at all" as "the author said Bush didn't show up at all." But by the time the White House released the records this afternoon, the buzz everywhere was that pay stubs prove nothing.

That's why you're seeing reports like this from CNN this afternoon, instead of the "case closed, let's move on" that the White House must have hoped for:

White House releases Bush's military payroll records

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The White House released payroll records Tuesday it said demonstrate that President Bush fulfilled his obligations to the Texas Air National Guard in the early 1970s, hoping to defuse lingering election-year questions about the president's service.

"These documents make it very clear that the president of the United States fulfilled his duties," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. "When you serve, you are paid for that service, and these documents outline the day he was paid."

But under questioning from reporters, McClellan said the records do not specifically show that Bush reported for Guard duty in Alabama, where he spent much of 1972 working on a Senate campaign. And he said the White House has been unable to locate anyone who remembers serving with Bush during that period.

However, McClellan said, "he was paid for the days he served in the Air National Guard. That's why I said that these records clearly document that the president fulfilled his duties."

Kevin Drum at Calpundit (whose degree is in journalism) has been tracking the documents in an evenhanded way, here, here and here (and probably more by the time you read this):

...the reason this is all controversial is because the existing record is both fragmentary and contradictory, a toxic combination that inevitably leads to lots of speculation as well as some outright conspiracy theorizing. A little Googling will show you what I mean.

My advice: don't go there. A bit of speculation is OK, but stay away from the wilder stuff. At the same time, there's also no reason to blindly accept whatever White House spin Dan Bartlett places on these documents.

There are at least two good reasons to be skeptical about Bush's story: (1) some of it simply doesn't add up and (2) he has refused to release his entire military record. Considering the trouble it's causing, why would he do that unless there were something awfully embarrassing in there?

Bottom line: if Bush's story is really true, he can put a stop to all this speculation instantly by simply ordering all the relevant archives to release his entire record, warts and all. Why won't he?

Indeed, Cohen writes,

George Bush (ducked the Vietnam war) by joining the National Guard. Bush now wants to drape the Vietnam-era Guard with the bloodied flag of today's Iraq-serving Guard -- "I wouldn't denigrate service to the Guard," Bush warned during his interview with Russert -- but the fact remained that back then the Guard was where you went if you did not want to fight. That was the case with me. I opposed the war in Vietnam and had no desire to fight it. Bush, on the other hand, says he supported the war -- as long, it seems, as someone else fought it.

It hardly matters what Bush did or did not do back in 1972. He is not the man now he was then -- that by his own admission. In the same way, it did not matter that Clinton ducked the draft, because, really, just about everyone I knew at the time was doing something similar. All that really matters is how one accounts for what one did. Do you tell the truth (which Clinton did not)? Or do you do what I think Bush has been doing, which is making his National Guard service into something it was not? In his case, it was a rich kid's way around the draft.

Cohen goes on to document his own Guard service with stunning candor:

In the end, I wound up in the Army Reserve. I was assigned to units for which I had no training -- tank repairman, for instance. In some units, we sat around with nothing to do and in one we took turns delivering antiwar lectures. The National Guard and the Reserves were something of a joke. Everyone knew it. Books have been written about it. Maybe things changed dramatically by 1972, two years after I got my discharge, but I kind of doubt it.

I have no shame about my service, but I know it for what it was -- hardly the Charge of the Light Brigade. When Bush attempts to drape the flag of today's Guard over the one he was in so long ago, when he warns his critics to remember that "there are a lot of really fine people who have served in the National Guard and who are serving in the National Guard today in Iraq," then he is doing now what he was doing then: hiding behind the ones who were really doing the fighting. It's about time he grew up.

Cohen may have singlehandedly kept the hunt for the truth about George Bush's candor about his service alive.

(The Post's headline on Cohen's column, "From Guardsman..." makes no sense online. In print it was apparently paired with a column by E. J. Dionne, Jr., headlined, "...to War President." The desk apparently gave no thought to the digital afterlife of either story.)
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Registration kicked in this afternoon at the Washington Post: They want an email address, password and zipcode. There are questions asking about your company, job title and industry, but one of the answer choices is "Other." Nothing is emailed back to you, and "offers" are opt-in.
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Nissan uses 'cannon' to stop hail: WLBT in Jackson, Miss., reports,

Nissan demonstrated its new device designed to protect its parking lot from a hailstorm for WLBT News on Tuesday. It is a cannon that sends sonic waves up to 50,000 feet in the air to keep hailstones from forming.

There are more than 400 such machines in operation in the world, and this is the ninth one installed in the United States. They are made in Canada and are used primarily to protect crops. It works by using its own radar to detect the conditions that are favorable for hail to form.

It automatically activates when its own weather radar system detects conditions favorable for the formation of hail. It fires every 5.5 seconds, making a sound we know can be heard at least five miles away from the Nissan plant near Canton. It then starts sending sound waves into the cloud every five-and-a-half seconds.

The sound at ground zero is about 120 decibels, or about the same as a tornado warning siren. Workers are installing fences around two of the machines in the 140-acre parking lot at Nissan and filling the fences with hay in an effort to reduce the sound level.

Eric Rademacher is an environmental engineer with Nissan who is an expert on the Hail Suppression System.

"Hailstones are formed and begin with a piece of dust in the clouds," he explains. "There is a lot of activity going on, and what we do is to de-ionize that activity in the clouds and keep those dust particles from collecting moisture out of the clouds in turn reacting and forming what we know as a hailstone." ...

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Giving robots a human face: I missed this CNN story last week, but it's interesting.

..."self-titled 'sculptor roboticist' David Hanson... who has worked as a designer, sculptor, and robotics developer for Walt Disney Imagineering, Universal Studios and MTV, thinks precise human looks are a must if people are going to effectively communicate with robots.

Like his previous project, K-bot, Hanson sculpted Hertz to resemble his girlfriend. It's sheathed in a high-tech polymer Hanson invented called "f'rubber," which resembles human skin. The face is embedded with tiny electronic motors, so Hertz can smile, frown or wrinkle its forehead.

But this may not be a good thing:

Inventor and author Ray Kurzweil thinks Hanson's work is significant because realistic facial movement will play an important role in the way future androids respond to humans.

First, however, robots will have to become significantly more intelligent, able to gauge the expressions of the people they encounter. Kurzweil estimates that we'll begin to see this human level of artificial intelligence around 2029. Until then, he believes less-realistic robots will be more successful.

"If a robot has a face that is not human, then we are more accepting of less-than-human behavior, as we would with an animal or doll," he said. "Intelligence significantly below that of normal humans stands out more with a robot that looks strikingly human. This creates the impression of a human with impaired intelligence, which may strike some as disturbing."

If this all intrigues you, there's a longer story about Hanson in the September issue of Popular Science: The Man Who Mistook His Girlfriend for a Robot
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February 9, 2004, 8:00 p.m.

Profits are good to have but jobs are good, too: An editorial today in the Toronto Globe and Mail offers some context for the links that follow:

...How you feel about the job picture in the United States -- or in Canada, for that matter -- depends a lot on your perspective. If you like corporate profitability, then the lack of jobs is a good thing rather than a bad thing, because it means companies are continuing to become more productive. That is, they are managing to do more with less, and that means more money flows to the bottom line (theoretically). Canada has been creating plenty of jobs, but that actually means we're less productive than the United States.

If you're an investor, you're more likely to cheer the lack of job growth than get gloomy. But if you are interested in or invested in consumer stocks such as retailers, auto makers and so on, low job growth is a double-edged sword. People who are out of work or worried about being downsized don't tend to spend a lot. That's part of why economists get concerned when job statistics are too low.

Higher productivity may look good to an investor because it means higher profits, but if you're out of work or concerned about your job, efficiency just means a smaller and tighter labour market. And if you're George W. Bush, that's going to keep you up at night, because when there aren't a lot of jobs around, the voters tend to turn on you, as George Bush Sr. found during the recession of the early 1990s -- something he (rightly or wrongly) blamed on Fed chairman Alan Greenspan.

Most economists believe the United States needs to add at least 150,000 jobs a month in order to keep pace with economic growth.

In the past five months, only 366,000 jobs have been created -- or about 70,000 a month. "This is the weakest job creation rate relative to economic growth on record," Steven Wood of Insight Economics told Reuters. The low job growth would be easy to understand if the economy were standing still, but it grew at an annual rate of 4 per cent in the fourth quarter and more than twice that fast in the third quarter. ...

From the Washington Post: Chinese Workers Pay for Wal-Mart's Low Prices: Retailer Squeezes Its Asian Suppliers to Cut Costs. The two salaries cited in the story are $120 a month and $75 a month.

As capital scours the globe for cheaper and more malleable workers, and as poor countries seek multinational companies to provide jobs, lift production and open export markets, Wal-Mart and China have forged themselves into the ultimate joint venture, their symbiosis influencing the terms of labor and consumption the world over.

With sales of more than $245 billion a year, Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in the United States, still the ultimate consumer market. China is the most populous country, with 1.3 billion people, most still poor enough to willingly move hundreds of miles from home for jobs that would be shunned by anyone with better prospects. The Communist Party government has become perhaps the world's greatest facilitator of capitalist production, beckoning multinational giants with tax-free zones and harsh punishment for anyone with designs on organizing a labor movement.

More than 80 percent of the 6,000 factories in Wal-Mart's worldwide database of suppliers are in China. Wal-Mart estimates it spent $15 billion on Chinese-made products last year, accounting for nearly one-eighth of all Chinese exports to the United States. If the company that Sam Walton built with his "Made in America" ad campaign were itself a separate nation, it would rank as China's fifth-largest export market, ahead of Germany and Britain.

Cutting to the chase,

"In the beginning, we made money," said a manager reached by telephone, who gave his name as Mr. Li.

"But when Wal-Mart started to launch nationwide distribution, they pressured us for a special price at below our cost. Now, we're losing money on every box, while Wal-Mart is making more money."

Related: Reuters Takes Outsourcing to a New Level With Journalists. The New York Times reports,

Reuters... told its editorial employees in an electronic posting late last week that it planned to hire six journalists in Bangalore, India, to do basic financial reporting on 3,000 small to medium-size American companies.

"It's a place where you can get people who understand English, understand financial statements, understand journalism and who are educated to a very high standard and eager to do this kind of work,'' David Schlesinger, global managing editor of Reuters, said in a telephone interview. They are also relatively inexpensive, he added.

Though Reuters, which has its headquarters in London, is perhaps best known as an international news agency, it draws most of its revenue from the more than 400,000 people on Wall Street and in other financial centers who use its financial services products.

I wish Tim Russert had asked President Bush about outsourcing in his Meet The Press interview yesterday.

The L.A. Times (reg.req) reports today, Report: Exporting Jobs Overseas Will Help U.S.

WASHINGTON — The movement of American factory jobs and white-collar work to other countries is part of a positive transformation that will enrich the U.S. economy over time, even if it causes short-term pain and dislocation, the Bush administration said today.

The embrace of foreign "outsourcing," an accelerating trend that has contributed to U.S. job losses in recent years and has become an issue in the 2004 elections, is contained in the president's annual report to Congress on the health of the U.S. economy. ...

...The report endorses the relatively new phenomenon of outsourcing high-end white-collar work to India and other countries, a trend that has created concern within affected professions such as computer programming and medical diagnostics.

"The gains from trade that take place over the Internet or telephone lines are no different then the gains from trade in physical goods transported by ship or plane," it says. "When a good or service is produced at lower cost in another country, it makes sense to import it rather than to produce it domestically.

Here's a graphic that's pretty disturbing, created by averaging monthly data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The White House today said it expects to create 2.6 million jobs this year, largely due to the tax cuts for the wealthy. Last year, the administration aimed to create1.7 million jobs, but instead lost 53,000 jobs, bringing the total number of jobs lost since Bush took office to 2.2 million, according to Reuters.
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Where winning on eBay became everything: Usually when you hear of terminal clutter in a house, the debris involves animal feces, dirty dishes, newspapers, and squalor.

Not this one. The bathroom is pristine, the bookshelves organized, colored bottle collections neatly displayed. But every surface of the house not neatly displaying collectibles is covered with boxes of more such items bought on eBay but not yet unpacked. Five megs of photos document the contrast.

The author says he's describing his mother's house, where he occupies a few square feet of bed.

Amazingly, the responses are bringing others like her out of the woodwork, including those who say, "I thought I was bad, now I feel a lot better." (The consensus is that this is a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.)

Even at MetaFilter, where the story is linked, the comments are a hoot.

The whole production is posted at Something Awful, a comedy site. But if it's a hoax, it's an amazing one. The poster answers questions, and even posts a photo of his mother, who looks normal enough.

Related: Life Laundry is a BBC site for those awash in clutter.
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Making "That's Right!": Engineer Ian Schreier talks about recording the Grammy-nominated album by Roomful of Blues.

That's Right! -- here's an mp3 of the title track, and there are more at their site -- by Rhode Island's own Roomful, was nominated for Best Traditional Blues Album, which Buddy's Guy's Blues Singer won.

It's at DigitalPostProduction.com, so expect a tech interview for audiophiles. It begins,

This is the story of earning a Grammy nomination the hard way. It involves an incredibly tight recording schedule, a skilled engineer, and a killer band that self-financed the album and then had to find a label to take it.

The band is Roomful of Blues, a 35-year-old blues institution that was ready to record its 17th album. They came to Osceola Recording Studios in Raleigh, NC, having met studio owner Dennis McGill, and were drawn by the Studer 24-track and a good rapport with engineer/producer Ian Schreier. And, because of their touring schedule, they had only a day and a half to record 14 songs.

For Schreier, the live session was like tightrope walking without a net. If a microphone was out of phase or if a trumpet take was distorted, there would be nothing he could do to change it later. Even though he edits and mixes digitally in Pro Tools, some things just can't be fixed in the mix. But fortunately, everything went right. It resulted in a recording that everyone involved loved, and the band found a new home at Alligator Records.

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Mozilla invites you to play with its newest experiment: Mozilla has released a "technology preview" of its Firefox browser (once called Phoenix, then Firebird, most of which turned out to be the names of other products). It's still in development (Firefox 0.8), not for beginners. From the release,

The Mozilla Foundation today announced the immediate availability of a new preview release of its next generation web browser, Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla Firefox 0.8 represents the bleeding edge of Internet technology and raises the bar for ease of use, performance, robustness and standards compliance.

The new release marks a significant milestone on the development roadmap towards the highly anticipated 1.0 release of the Mozilla project’s next generation web browser. ...

If you'd like to play with a more stable Mozilla creation,

Mozilla 1.6 is a mature Internet suite that combines a web browser, email client, easy to use web page editor and Internet Chat software. In the twenty days since its release, Mozilla 1.6 has been downloaded close to a million times, setting a new record for the Mozilla project – a powerful testament to the pent-up user demand for an evolutionary, feature-rich, stable and secure web browser suite. Mozilla 1.6 has received rave reviews from users and media alike and includes close to 1000 bug fixes, new features and performance enhancements.

The open-source, cooperatively developed son of Netscape comes with popups blocked by default and a host of other user-friendly features. Developers have written their own "extensions" -- little improvements, such as one that recalls the URLs of all the tabs you had open if your computer crashes, so you can boot back to where you were. I've been using Mozilla here for a long time, and won't go back...
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What is lost by denying visas to Cuban artists? Hearts and minds: After Cuban musicians, including the popular Ibrahim Ferrer, at right, of the The Buena Vista Social Club, were refused visas to attend the Grammys, the Miami Herald posts an essay by Enrique Fernández, The Herald's features editor. During the 2001 Latin Grammy show, he was executive director of the Latin Recording Academy.

The decision by the U.S. government to deny visas to Cuban musicians invited to attend the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles yesterday is in sync with the sentiment of many in Miami's Cuban community. But, how smart is it?

According to Friday's Herald, a State Department official said that this denial was meant ``to prevent the flow of dollars through compensation received by the artists, considered to be government employees, from reaching Cuba's coffers.''

This is precisely the argument made by Cuban exile groups who have lobbied for exclusion of Cuban nationals from the Grammy ceremony over the past few years...

... So now we are preventing the flow of dollars to Castro's coffers. How much money are we talking about? Cuba is a musical powerhouse, not a commercial one. The best-selling Cuban CD ever was made by an American, Ry Cooder. No one except hard-core Santería followers buy Ros, and even the ever popular Valdés is not exactly Britney Spears.

What is lost by denying visas to these artists? The usual. Hearts and minds. Both the U.S. government and the Miami exile community -- reviled by Castro as ''the Mafia'' -- look like yahoos. Once more.

''It's stupid to protest music,'' a militant but astute exile told me during a Miami Compay Segundo concert that had to be vacated because of a bomb threat. ``You only make enemies that way, because everybody loves music. Instead, you [should] use the media exposure of a musical event to talk about political prisoners, government oppression, things that most people can get behind. You will convince no one that music is evil.''

So now the Cuban government trots out Ibrahim Ferrer, the irresistibly charming old singer, rescued from obscurity by the Buena Vista Social Club. Look, they say, this is the ''terrorist'' the U.S. fears. And they -- and the whole world -- have a good laugh at our expense.

Some have said that Castro's biggest ally is the Miami exile community, which follows the script written in Havana to the letter. The Bush administration is giving it a good reading as well.

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Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com