|
Monday, July 26, 2004
No news 
Democracy gets personal
| | Hey, Jeff Greenfield just had a little dialog with Dave, who did pretty well for a rookie TV guy (10:47pm Pacific). |
Fire the lawyers, probably
| | What do you think Woody would say (or sing) if he lived to see this? |
They don't have an answer
| | Ever notice what people mean when they say "That's a good question?" |
Live from the distributed Peanut Gallery
| | Driving to the hotel, I listened to Randi Rhodes on AirAmerica Radio, which is on a big, full-time AM station here in Portland (most of the others are kinda dinky, if you can get them at all). She was talking about how AirAmerica is the only liberal talk network in the lineup of talkers that are apparently arranged in a row at the DNC. Although all the hosts on AAR have rubber-stamp opinions, I like some of the voices there. Randi has real New Yawk sass, which is what I like about the Stern show too. (Hey, Micah's there too.) |
| | Jimmy Carter is speaking now. I've always liked the guy, who succeeded mostly because he's the living embodiment of A Good Man. Not because he was a great speaker, Lord knows. I'm watching proof of that again right now, here in my hotel room, where Carter's steely integrity persists, undiminished, on CNN. But he still speaks like a church deacon. In the old days he sounded like his teeth were too big. Now he sounds like his dentures are loose. (Hell, I just hope I'm alive at his age.) |
| | Not that it matters, of course. He's getting standing applause for his sound bites. |
| | (Why 'bites'? Why not call them 'spits' or 'gurges'?) |
| | "At risk is nothing less than our nation's soul," he just said. That seems right. Meanwhile, I'm wondering how our soul acts. Do we do good by helping others? Or do we do good by getting rid of bad guys — especially when we've taken direct hits from those bad guys, and are likely to take more? That's a stark choice. |
| | The Bush Administration reacted to 9/11 by taking the country to war against "terrorism," and defined that term in an extremely simple way. We're fighting evil. And You're with us or against us. In the context of the attacks of 9/11, the Bush Case makes deep and clear sense. |
| | The whole context, however, is much more complex. We had history, however unintentional, behind the 9/11 attacks. We supported Osama, Saddam, the Taliban and various other bad guys in the past. In many ways, our war against terrorism (especially in Iraq) has amounted to fighting fire with gasoline. Carter is right that we squandered massive quantities of good will and sympathy after 9/11. We held the high moral ground at that time; then we decided to act as if the only high ground that mattered was military force. |
| | Which was exactly why we got our asses kicked in Vietnam. |
| | To al-Moqrin and Islamic global guerrillas in general, all companies providing "outsourced" support services to the Saudi and American governments fall under the "Halliburton" label. |
| | A focus on "Halliburton" is in line with global guerrilla strategy. The market for outsourced services provided by western and associated companies are critical to the reconstruction of Iraq, the logistics of the US military, and the operation of critical infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. It's our "soft underbelly." Because these services form a market network, global guerrillas can use the dynamics of the marketplace to amplify the impact of their attacks. |
| | How these attacks work
The endless series of hostage dramas and assaults on contractors in Iraq form a pattern. They are aimed at the fault lines in the "outsourced services" market. This pattern is quickly being copied via stigmergic learning by a rapidly proliferating number of groups. Global guerrillas are using the following methods to disrupt this market: |
| | - Companies. Assaults on employees in Saudi Arabia forced the engineering company ABB to withdraw their employees. Within Iraq: Siemens, Tekhnopromexport, GE, etc. have withdrawn employees due to direct pressure. Focused attacks on specific employers can create pressures within boardrooms and among employees/families back home to withdraw.
- Nations. An indirect method of coercing companies is to target employees of specific nationalities. Attacks on South Korean, Chinese, and Russian employees have resulted in government pressured evacuations of workers of those nationalities from Iraq. The attacks in Saudi Arabia targeting Americans, has caused the US government to urge that all Americans leave the country. This strategy will increasingly widen to include nations outside the US coalition (Egypt, Kenya, China, and Russia have already been targeted). Nations will increasingly tire of the crisis management and domestic political fallout caused by these attacks.
- Individuals. Beheadings and seemingly random assassinations, in particular, have created a climate of fear among employees of outsourced service companies. This fear has driven thousands of Americans and Europeans working for companies in Saudi Arabia and Iraq back home.
|
| | The impact of this disruption |
| | The ongoing attacks against these companies and their employees are increasingly undermining the operation of the market for outsourced services. In large part this is due to the reaction of the marketplace to these systemic insults. These reactions include: |
| | - Higher transaction costs. The need to protect employees has driven up costs across the board. Approximately 25% (although recent reports indicate that this may have risen to as high as 50%) of all reconstruction expenditures are now for private security services to protect employees (an impact that will be measured in billions of dollars). Lengthy security procedures severely limit the workday (by up to 1/3) for domestic employees of "Halliburton" companies. Companies are also being forced to offer substantial bonus pay (often exceeding 100% of pay) as a risk-premium to entice expatriate employees to work in these areas. Additionally, insurance costs have skyrocketed.
- Systemic chaos. Many of these attacks have been focused on workers involved in corporate logistics/transportation. This disruption has had a systemic impact on all work being done in Iraq. Critical parts, military supplies, food, etc have been interdicted. The loss of key engineers, through departures or injury/death due to attacks, have left critical projects in Iraq's electiricity reconstruction in piles of parts on the floor.
- Stalled decision making. These attacks have increased uncertainty to the level necessary to impair the allocation of investments and the contracting process. The recent disclosures that the vast majority of Iraq's reconstruction funds are still uncommitted, demonstrate this problem. This uncertainty makes it difficult to: entice companies to participate in reconstruction work, to determine metrics of success (profit/loss), to secure insurance, etc. (basically, everything necessary to build plans for the future). The end result, is that business decisions are put off into the future in the expectation that eventually, the security situation will improve and uncertainty will be reduced.
|
| | Global guerrilla attacks and abductions will continue. However, the bazaar of violence in the country will continue to reward innovation and its networked participant organizations will quickly implement these advances. The result will be an acceleration of the outsourcing market's current distress. While many new methods will be tried, the innovations that will gain the most traction are the following (although they will require participation of al Qaeda or al Tawhid for international operations during the initial phases) |
| | "We aided terrorists by harboring an uncontrollable desire to go to war with Iraq," was the point Carter just made to the News Hour panel on PBS (which I'm watching because it has no ads). Carter wants us to bring France, Germany and Russia in on the real war that's still going on, against a strengthened enemy. |
| | She was my editor for many years when I wrote a regular column for the old "Upside," the precursor of silicon valley business mags. She was the editor who encouraged me to go wild with metaphors--as long as I could back them up with telling detail. She was a writer's editor. |
| | In her last months she hoped to blog on her cancer, and on health care reform from the standpoint of the patient. |
| | I'll pause to add that it really sucks that Upside's archives appear to have gone to oblivion. |
| | Hillary's up now, saying nice things about the man she made sleep on the couch after finding out, with the rest of the country, that he lied about being a lying philanderer. (I'd say "phucking philanderer," but alas.) Ever notice that Hillary looks and talks like a talk show host? Is that what a visiting New York senator is/does these days? Just wondering. |
| | Now the former Philanderer in Chief is up. Man, he's improved as a speaker. Remember his State of the Union speeches? My point exactly. Pure anesthesia. This speech is a knockout. Well done. Nobody on the tube has said it yet (that I've seen/heard), but this was Clinton's best speech, ever. Joe Klein seems to agree. |
| | (Aside: Was he lying when he said he recently made the top income bracket "for the first time"? His lips were moving, so there's a good chance.) |
| | Wow, he looks so much like Kennedy. Not separated at birth, but joined by death. Strange. |
| | Here's the sound bite: "Send me." Referring to Kerry's bravery in volunteering to fight in Vietnam. "John Kerry took tough positions on tough problems." (Woops: I just typed "poisons" instead of "positions," by, um, mistake.) |
| | Whoa! PBS lost its feed. I just went to CNN, which broke in the middle of Clinton's speech for an ad. Awful. (Benefit of doubt: I'm sure it's because they didn't want dead air). Now I'm on Fox. Not that I'm watching, since the talkers are back to talking. |
| | I'm back on the PBS station now. Like Fox, talk-wise, only boring beyond endurance. They have three women on there right now, wringing their hands about corrupt athletes or something. "We have to change the culture," one just said. Makes me want to reach for an antidote. Here's another. |
| | Back to Fox. Jesse Jackson is a guest talker on Fox. The older Jackson gets, the more he looks like E.T. (I'm looking more like Uncle Ho, only fatter and slighly less dead.) He's not rhyming anything, but he's still slurring his speech, which has always driven me nuts. |
| | According to the Army, between 2000 and 2003 its doctors performed four hundred and ninety-six breast enlargements and a thousand three hundred and sixty-one liposuction surgeries on soldiers and their dependents. In the first three months of 2004, it performed sixty breast enhancements and two hundred and thirty-one liposuctions. |
| | Theresa Heinz Kerry is catching shit for saying "unamerican" and then denying it. CNN showed the clip where she said whatever it was she said, and it was clear that she wasn't sure what to say and just blathered something. It's a nothing. Amazing how much gas is being burned over it. (Drudge is smacking his lips like Jabba the Hutt over THK dirt.) |
| | Nice pic of leftybloggers. Looks like a puppet laptop is the only one talking. |
Postancy
| | That's my neoblogism for post latency. I've been storing a heap of posts that I want to forward onto the blog before I turn my attentions to the Democratic Convention in Boston and OSCon here in Portland. I'll be talking about the former here and the latter at Linux Journal and IT Garage. Here we go: |
| | Excellent dialog between Mike and Dean at Mike's blog, Keep Trying. The question: Is blogging getting more decadent? By which he means, self-indulgent. Another way of putting it: Does monologue overcome dialogue? My corollary, Is the echo chamber that matters most the one between our fingers and our mirrors? Answer honestly. |
| | I wish Antonio supported comments. That's a compliment, by the way. |
| | There's been so much talk about the back channel, and how to merge the panels and the audience to create an active discussion, meanwhile the answer has always been right outside of the conference room. Merging all this into one fluid discussion is not something we need to figure out how to do, we're already doing it. We just need to recognize where this is happening and take advantage of it. |
| | So I'm proposing this - let's actually do it and see what happens. We'll pick a hotel in some city with a big lobby with wifi access and a date, and that's it. No panels, no time limits, no structure, no sponsors trying to push their products. Just the people and the lobby. We'll publish the list of attendees as soon as they sign up and that will be the conference. A long weekend, or a few days during a week. I don't know if it will work, but if anyone thinks it's an interesting idea post here, or trackback and if enough people actually think it's worthwhile I'll see what I can do about setting it up. |
| | Turns out that his wife went lesbian, and instead of divorcing her he decided to get a sex change so they could still be together. |
| | CNN's convention bumper music sounds like the triumphal march from the first (4th) Star Wars. |
Better than hating pets
| | I have a pet hate. It's not a big one. It's also cheap and easy to maintain. |
| | Here it is: I hate it when a flight attendant takes my cup of iced water before I'm done with it, just because I'm not drinking it right now. |
| | That's what just happened, here over Southern Oregon, on a 737 headed for Portland. I went to reach for my drink, and a uniformed hand snatched it away while my hand was almost there, threw the cup in a garbage bag and continued down the aisle before I could say "Hey!" |
| | Ever notice how, when waiters and waitresses are about to do the same kind of thing, they say, "Can I take that for you?" they actually mean "Can I take that from you?" |
| | It's a quibble, yeah, but it's all I have to blog about from such a disconnected distance? |
Speak Age
| | BOSTON - A colorful cast of thousands -- politicians, delegates, reporters, security personnel, barbed-wire vendors, protesters, anarchists, jabbering wacko space loons, bomb-sniffing dogs and Dennis Kucinich -- has converged on this historic city as the Democrats gather for a convention that has been carefully scripted to galvanize America's voters with the convention's Official Theme: ``Four Solid Days of Talking.'' |
| | Okay, I'm off to Portland. |
What's a democracy for?
| | In that same spirit, I thought I'd ask the same about democracy. |
| | That's because I think the two are linked; and, with a connected citizenry, we are in a position to practice Real Democracy, or something closer to that ideal, for the first time. |
| | But... What's the ideal? Getting your guy (or gal) elected? Running the other guy (or gal) out of town? Government of, by and for the people? Or something else? |
| | This week I'll be looking for signs of partisanship; not for a candidate, but for a system that's just beginning, and that we've needed for a long time. |
| | Power from the people, people. Not the other way around. Finally. |
Tripping
| | I'm headed to OSCon in Portland today, after four days of time off with family (down at the house to celebrate various birthdays — a new family summer tradition). |
| | Should be fun to cover OSCon while watching other bloggers' coverage of The Convention. Looking forward to Technorati's work with CNN there. Meanwhile, CNN's index page features a "What do you most wnt to see and hear from the convention?" email us question under a banner that says Voices/Blog. They also feature a linkproof "CNN's convention blog" link that goes to a window with this text: |
| | On July 26 CNN.com starts blogging from the Democratic National convention. From the first gavel to the last balloon drop, CNN's convention team -- including Candy Crowley from the podium, John King reporting from the floor, James Carville, Judy Woodruff, Wolf Blitzer, Jeff Greenfield, Tucker Carlson and more -- bring you the inside scoop and behind the scene news from John Kerry's big show. |
| | I'm expecting they'll get more outside-blog-friendly as the week goes on. I understand there'll be more pointage regarding non-CNN bloggers later today. |
There are responses to this message:
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
