Live from Austin!

I’ve been away in New York this week, at the IBM Palisades Executive Conference Center. Four days of team meetings with my immediate project team. Four of us are located in Austin, but senior management were in New York, so everyone traveled to New York via New Jersey.

Traveling from Newark airport to Palisades isn’t exactly difficult, but it’s surprisingly easy to end up in Manhattan accidentally. There are two main traps I’ll need to remember if I go there again.

The first trap is that the New Jersey Turnpike splits into two on the way north, and the two halves have entirely different sets of exits and available destinations. Computer-generated routes don’t mention this. The “local” route was the one we wanted; the “express” route has a different set of exits, turns and signposts which bore no resemblance to the ones in the directions.

The second trap is that at some point, you want to transition from the New Jersey Turnpike to the Palisades Interstate Parkway. Doing so apparently involves driving towards the George Washington Bridge, being funneled towards the toll plaza, then cutting across five lanes of traffic to a small left exit labeled Fort Lee. If you fail to make it, or don’t see the left exit, you’re screwed—there’s no way to turn around without going across the bridge to Manhattan, turning left twice, and coming all the way back. To add to the irritation, they’ll charge you $6 for the pleasure of going across the bridge to Manhattan, even though you have zero desire to do so. This trap wasn’t mentioned in any of the directions either, and explains how our route from Newark to Palisades came to include the Bronx.

We opted to take 9N and go back across the river at the next bridge, rather than try again to negotiate the maze of roads near the Washington bridge in the dark. Fortunately I’d had the foresight to bring the GPS, so we were making progress, and not in any real danger of getting totally lost. Our route was sub-optimal and slow, but we’d get there.

Once we could see the Tappan Zee bridge, there was the minor problem of getting onto it. You’d think it would be well signposted from most nearby road junctions, but you’d think wrong. We stopped at one of the few open gas stations to ask for more specific directions than “drive up and down the coast until you see a way on”. The guy behind the counter said “I’m afraid I’m not from around here, I have no idea.”

There was a pause. I turned around and looked at the other gas station employee, standing by the door. “I’m not from around here either,” he said apologetically. “This is a brand new station, they brought us in from somewhere else.”

So on the whole, a farce which has done nothing to improve my general feelings about New York.

One of the things that continues to amaze me about the US is that Americans seem to believe they have the best healthcare in the world.

Truth is, Americans have the most expensive healthcare in the world. A few of them have excellent healthcare, but most get the kind of treatment you’d get in a third world nation.

Bloated, blue-collar Americans—gorged on diets of fries and burgers, but denied their share of US riches—are bringing the nation’s steady rise in life expectancy to a halt.

Twenty years ago, the US, the richest nation on the planet, led the world’s longevity league. Today, American women rank 19th, while males can manage only 28th place, alongside men from Brunei.

These figures are blamed by researchers on two key factors: obesity, and inequality of health care. A man born in a poor area of Washington can have a life expectancy that is 40 years less than a woman in a prosperous neighbourhood only a few blocks away, for example.

[...]

In another newly published paper, statisticians at Boston College reveal that in France, Japan and Switzerland, men and women aged 65 now live several years longer than they do in the US. Indeed, America only just scrapes above Mexico and most East European nations.

This decline is astonishing given America’s wealth. Not only is it the richest nation, it devotes more gross domestic product ? 13 per cent ? to health care than any other developed nation.

[...]

When the Boston College group compared men and women in America’s top 10 per cent wage bracket with those in the bottom 10 per cent, they found the former group earned 17 times more than the latter. In Japan, Switzerland and Norway, this ratio is only five to one.

Jacobs and Morone state: ’Check-ups, screenings and vaccinations save lives, improve well-being, and are shockingly uneven [in America]. Well-insured people get assigned hospital beds; the uninsured get patched up and sent back to the streets.’ For poor Americans, health service provision is little better than that in third world nations. ’People die younger in Harlem than in Bangladesh,’ report Jacobs and Morone.

—The Observer

This, to me, is another excellent example of the free market failing to do the job. We have a free market in insurance, choice of doctors, choice of drugs, choice of healthcare providers, and people pay their own way—so by the magic of the invisible hand, America should have the cheapest, most efficient universal healthcare in the world, yes? Much better than those state-run bureaucratic socialized European healthcare systems, certainly.

Yet, the reverse is true. America has worse healthcare and pays more for it.

The results are in:

The comprehensive 15-month search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has concluded that the only chemical or biological agents that Saddam Hussein’s regime was working on before last year’s invasion were small quantities of poisons, most likely for use in assassinations.

A draft of the Iraq Survey Group’s final report circulating in Washington found no sign of the alleged illegal stockpiles that the US and Britain presented as the justification for going to war, nor did it find any evidence of efforts to reconstitute Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme.

—Guardian

So there we have it. Iraq had no WMD. Those reports on Fox News saying they’d found sarin and mustard gas bombs were just typical Fox News propaganda, it seems. No chemical weapons in mass quantities were actually found, nor were there any factories capable of making them.

Wednesday’s Guardian had a story with the headline Bush names rightwing Republican as CIA chief. I half expected to see a story elsewhere on the page saying Study confirms bears defecate in woods or Pope announces he isn’t Jewish. Yes, I’m talking about the guy who says he’s not qualified for a job at the CIA.

Also yesterday, Wikipedia’s featured article was MKULTRA. I must admit, I was amazed by some of the details. It makes me realize that the Church of Scientology’s rabid hatred of psychiatry makes some kind of sense, in the 50s and 60s context of the cult’s growth. Did L. Ron Hubbard know that the leader of the World Psychiatric Association was carrying out experiments that involved deliberately putting people into comas and giving them electroshock at 30x normal voltage? Or did he merely suspect?

Thirdly, a quick pointer to Jeff The Pacifist Bomb, written back before the Iraq war but not posted until now.

In case you missed it:

The retrial of a Moroccan man convicted of involvement in the September 11 attacks appeared to be in doubt last night after the Bush administration refused to allow two key al-Qaida suspects to give evidence.

On the first day of the new trial of Mounir el Motassadeq, a court in Hamburg was told that the US had refused to allow its al-Qaida suspects to be questioned in Germany.

Mr Motassadeq, 30, is accused of plotting the attacks in 2001 together with Mohamed Atta and other members of Hamburg’s al-Qaida cell.

Washington’s announcement came as Mr Motassadeq’s defence lawyer tried to have the case thrown out. Josef Graessle-Muenscher told the court it would be impossible to find out what had really happened on September 11 because al-Qaida suspects in US custody had probably been tortured.

“In this swamp of torture and prison camps, no court can ascertain the truth any more,” he said in an intervention detailing US abuses of prisoners, especially at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba

—Guardian 2004-08-11

Yup, you read it right—one of the guys who the German government believe helped plan the 9/11 attacks may walk free because the Bush administration won’t let suspects held in Guatánamo Bay give evidence.

Remind me, why are they there again?

I’m sure there are some people who still doubt that Bush decided to attack Iraq immediately after 9/11, in spite of the fact that the 9/11 attackers were Saudi Arabian and Iraq had nothing to do with it at all. So:

PRESIDENT George Bush first asked Tony Blair to support the removal of Saddam Hussein from power at a private White House dinner nine days after the terror attacks of 11 September, 2001.

According to Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to Washington, who was at the dinner when Blair became the first foreign leader to visit America after the strikes using hijacked jets, Blair told Bush he should not get distracted from the war on terror’s initial goal—dealing with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Meyer claims Bush replied: ‘I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.’ Regime change was already US policy.

It was clear, Meyer says, ‘that when we did come back to Iraq it wouldn’t be to discuss smarter sanctions’. Elsewhere in his interview, Meyer says Blair always believed it was unlikely that Saddam would be removed from power or give up his weapons of mass destruction without a war.

Faced with this prospect of a further war, he adds, Blair ‘said nothing to demur’.

Details of this extraordinary conversation will be published this week in a 25,000-word article on the path to war with Iraq in the May issue of the American magazine Vanity Fair. It provides new corroboration of the claims made last month in a book by Bush’s former counter-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke, that Bush was ‘obsessed’ with Iraq as his principal target after 9/11.

—Observer

President Bill Clinton’s administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction, according to classified documents made available for the first time.

Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene.

Intelligence reports obtained using the US Freedom of Information Act show the cabinet and almost certainly the president had been told of a planned “final solution to eliminate all Tutsis” before the slaughter reached its peak.

It took Hutu death squads three months from April 6 to murder an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus and at each stage accurate, detailed reports were reaching Washington’s top policymakers.

—Guardian

I know it’s churlish of me to keep harping on about this, but:

…investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones. In public statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen—combining pox virus and snake venom—that led U.S. scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months. The investigators assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a “grave and gathering danger” by President Bush and a “mortal threat” by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s.

[…]

The defection of Hussein Kamel was a turning point in the U.N.-imposed disarmament of Iraq in the 1990s. Kamel, who had married one of Saddam Hussein’s daughters, Raghad, and controlled Baghdad’s Military Industrial Commission, told his Western debriefers about major programs in biological and nuclear weaponry that had gone undetected or unconfirmed. Iraq was forced to acknowledge what he exposed, but neither inspectors nor U.S. officials were sure Kamel had told all there was to tell.

A handwritten Iraqi damage report, composed five days after the defection, now suggests that Kamel left little or nothing out.

[…]

The most significant point in [Hossam] Amin’s letter, U.S. and European experts said, is his unambiguous report that Iraq destroyed its entire inventory of biological weapons.

—Washington Post

So Saddam’s brother-in-law, #1 in charge of weapons programs, personally defects and sings like a canary. The story says he told us about “major programs”; what it doesn’t mention is that he told us they were all shut down. However, the government didn’t want to believe him, and we went ahead with the war anyway. Now we discover from the reports of Iraq’s #1 guy in charge of intelligence, that Saddam’s brother-in-law was telling the truth. Well, duh.

The 2001 Remake. Ugh. I’d heard it was a stinker, but Tim Burton’s made some great movies, so I decided to watch it anyway.

It seems from the commentary that Burton was mainly interested in the aesthetics of having a bunch of great actors dressed up in really good ape suits. He does a great job of coming up with a convincing fantasy world of semi-civilized apes; it’s the SF pieces and the plot that make this a stinker. An infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters probably could have come up with a script that made more sense.

So our hero (in the least convincing spacesuit I’ve seen since the original Buck Rogers) travels through an electrical storm somewhere near Saturn, and ends up a few hundred years into the future. We can tell this because his spacecraft has a clock that shows the year, and which somehow measures that he’s being whisked through time.

The spaceship emerges from the storm near a planet, and crashes in a lake; the hero wanders into a jungle and encounters a world of intelligent apes, and is captured. He makes friends with a female ape, escapes with her and some humans and a few other apes, and a lengthy chase ensues.

They make it to where the hero’s spacesuit crashed. He retrieves the survival equipment which he apparently hadn’t felt was worth retrieving when he crashed. The radio receiver locks on to a rescue ship, or so he thinks.

They follow the signal through more conflict and chases, and find the skeletal ruins of the space station the hero launched from. The command center is nevertheless intact and fully functional and still recognizes his handprint. He plays back the log, and discovers the space station went after him, crashed on the planet, and the genetically enhanced smart chimps they were using to test pilot the spacecraft (yeah, right) turned vicious and attacked. It’s these apes which became the ape civilization he’s now in, hundreds of years later.

So far, so good. A bunch of stuff happens which we needn’t go into, and eventually the hero leaves the ape planet in a spacecraft to return through the electrical storm back to his own time. The spacecraft clock obligingly winds backwards to 2036 or so.

Arriving back in the past the hero skips Saturn and the space station, and heads straight for Earth. (Why? We’ll probably never know.) His spacecraft is going haywire from the electrical storm, so he chooses Washington, DC as a sensible emergency landing place. (Sure, why not?) He crashes from orbit onto the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, but emerges completely unhurt from the smouldering wreckage. (Cap’n, the audience’s disbelief cannae be suspended much longer!)

But it’s not the Lincoln Memorial! Instead, it’s a memorial to… the ape bad guy from several hundred years in the future. The audience sits and goes “Huh?” as the credits roll.

So if you want to see a bunch of actors in ape costumes in a lush and believable fantasy world, this is the movie to watch. If you want a plot that makes sense, you’d be better off with the original, sad to say.

The next World Bank meeting is due to be held in Washington, DC on September 25th. However, DC’s police chief says his force won’t provide security coverage unless the attendees come up with a few million dollars to pay for it—as the force still hasn’t been reimbursed for the millions it spent trying to protect the previous meetings from protestors.

Other agencies are also waiting to see if they’ll get paid; having requested 3,000 officers from elsewhere, DC police have only had 700 volunteers…

I watched Mr Smith Goes To Washington last night. It’s one of those movies that you just have to watch if you’re a movie fan.

Unfortunately, I didn’t think all that much of it. It’s overlong at 129 minutes, too sugary in places, and the children are portrayed in a gratingly “Gosh, gee willikers Mister!” style. I’m still glad I watched it, though.