the guy by the door …

[Photo: Democracy Now!]

That would be the latest accounting of the cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Professor Linda Bilmes¹ of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz appeared on the Friday broadcast of Democracy Now! If you missed it on satellite, cable TV, and radio, you can download it from the web and play it on your computer.

¹In an earlier edition, I mispeled ‘Bilmes’. I apologize. As for the marginal impertinence of the title, I’m sticking with the ‘competing with Drudge’ defense.

Last Wednesday on Democracy Now!

… to “the guy who makes windows” wherein I will continue to recount tales of Sidney. You might say, “it’s been a while now,” to which I say:

rembrance is for the rememberers. the rememberee is otherwise occupied.

  -William F. Buckley, Jr.

Bill got one thing right in his life.

-the guy by the door.

It is, i am told, the Islamic Call to Prayer.

¹

¹

¹

Do I get what wearing the hijab is about? Egyptian Eyes told me, in somewhat legalistic terms, and I’m not sure I got it. But I did notice my attention being relentlessly drawn to her eyes. I was afraid to tell her how beautiful she is. I was afraid of causing friction between her and Allah. But she was disappointed with a picture another photographer had taken of her. She’s devout, not blind. If the eyes are the window to the soul, does the hijab focus attention on the profound?

Part of Islam Awareness Week sponsored by the Harvard Islamic Society.

¹Well, Joe it sure ain’t easy, especially trying to learn it as an old guy. I had ISO set all the way up from the night before. Hence much of the noise. More serious, I didn’t know what I had until later. I could not have gotten a close-up of the young man. I tried, but he had finished the adhan. But, as you can see I was near the women. A moment’s thought and I would have had something more than spectacular. But then perhaps it was not meant to be.

12:06 AM

…might explain some things.

Then again maybe not.

Harvard Masters of Business Administration 1975. [Photo: Wikimedia Foundation]

I have to go see Leo Godwin of the United States Internal Revenue Service in a bit. After seven years, he noticed that I sold $250,000 worth of stock. But what he did notice is that some of it was bought on margin. Which means, I didn’t have the money. And I sold it within a few minutes at essentially the same price because it was either moving the wrong way or was moving the right way and turned around. Most of the stock, I never owned, I borrowed it from the broker, sold it, and a few minutes later, bought stock to give back to the broker. This is called “selling short”. Some people make money doing this stuff, but I don’t have the constitution for it. It is a roller coaster ride powered by the conflict between fear and greed. I did it because I was pretty sure Harvard would succeed in outsourcing me and I needed to find some way to make money. That was not it.

Anyway, if you make money doing this stuff, it is taxed as income.¹ But Leo wants half of the $250,000, most of which I never had. Leo knows that there’s nowhere near that much in the account now. If Leo really wanted to be helpful, he would ask the broker if I every withdrew anything ‘cuz I didn’t. But Leo didn’t do that. Leo came to my apartment. Actually he met me on the porch, where I explained all this to him. He wanted me to fill out some forms and produce some records. I invited him in to show him why that was an unreasonable expectation. He refused. There’s a lot more to this story. Stay tuned. I do feel I owe an apology to that portion of the left that didn’t refuse to help me keep my job at Harvard, but not to the Gummint. Given that SCOTUS broke the court system in 2000 and the Executive … well… I’ll try the Legislative.

¹If you hold the stock for some period of months, it is then called “capital gains” and is taxed at a lower rate. The down side of that approach is that you actually have to have the money to buy the stock.

On Friday Feb. 15, 2008 Judge Jeffrey S. White of the U. S. District Court, Northern District of California, ordered Dynadot LLC, the Domain Name Registrar for Wikileaks.org, to “immediately disable the wikileaks.org domain name and account to prevent access to and any changes from being made to the domain name and account information.”1 Wikileaks is the anonymized network that, among other things, released the Operations Manual for Camp Delta, Guantánamo.

A post in the wee hours of Saturday morning on Freedom4um noted the WikiLeaks either had Domain Name Service problems or was under a Temporary Restraining Order. Subsequent posters later in the morning confirmed that WikiLeaks was not accessible through its domain name wikileaks.org, but was accessible through some but not all of its Public Cover Names. Wired reported the story on Presidents Day [Monday Feb. 18, 2008].

I found out about this, NOT because Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society was practicing eternal vigilance. No, it was Havard’s Philosophy Librarian who still reads slashdot regularly who - in reporting on Google Knol - linked to slashdot. I followed the wrong link, scrolled to find Jason’s target, found this which points to an article by Apple employee #10 Robert X. Cringely.²

I do, at some point, want to get back to Jason’s Google Knol post, but the whole search business is such a can of worms. For example, what people with inside knowledge of Harvard’s deal with Google, went long on Google stock and shorted competitors? Does such conduct, if it occurred, “…conduce to the education of the English and Indian youth of this country, in knowledge and godliness…”? Maybe the answer will appear on WikiLeaks.

¹This purported copy of the court order is being served up by WikiLeakS Christmas Island server. I suppose I could figure out how to confirm it’s authenticity, but the claim is there’s some law talent in the Berkman Center. Maybe they could do it more easily?
²He, among others, points out that the IP address [88.80.13.160] of the main U.S. site still works.

Mexican President Felipe Calderón visited his alma mater, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Some folks were not happy to see him:

Some believe he stole the election:

[Click no to fraud] With Nobel Laureates Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz^[1] on the board^[2], The Center for Economic And Policy Research is hardly a radical think tank. They found evidence of voting irregularities.^[3]

Two of the poorest of the Mexican states were represented. From Chiapas:

Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN
or to us gringoes, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. They’re opposed to neo-liberal globalization. Probably don’t like the late Larry Summers either.

Representing Oaxaca, APPO Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca). They were formed in response to repression of labor organizing. Mumia Abu-Jamal writes.

I’m guessing at this point Calderon is being escorted out of the building.

The anarcho-syndicalists as well as the APPO are showing their flags. I have no idea what’s up with the Betsy Ross flag.

Caldergóne.

I have no idea what was said inside. I gave up trying to get into those things after the entire Kennedy School bought David Kaye’s Escherichia coli about Iraqi WMD, “We were all fooled.” All except the guy by the door. The proof is in the vault of the Clerk of the City of Cambridge.

Just prior to Calderón’s visit, Larry Cox of Amnesty International USA issued an open letter urging him to “…commit during your visit to ending serious human rights violations in Mexico…” Calderón is a KSG alum. Thanks to STOP TORTURE, we know about Alberto Gonzales. Today’s revelation is about Antonin Scalia HLS ‘80. What are we teaching these people?

A better world IS possible - precisely BECAUSE it is NOT INEVITABLE. What we do matters. All of us. Running around with flags in the cold, cold, dark is not nothing, but it is not a plan. What constitutes a vision seems to be in the mind of the beholder.^[4] The idea of a direction, allows for the possibility that folks might agree on something more than running around in the dark with flags. Unfortunately, at the moment, it’s not looking too good for the Education Establishment as a vector for the urgently necessary progressive change.

^[1]In Globalization and Its Discontents, Stiglitz criticizes the methods of globalization used by the late Larry Summers during the “transition” of the Russian economy and later while Treasury Secretary.

²Note that Harvard Labor Economist Richard Freeman is also on the board. Most labor economists are paid by management to figure out how to “contain labor costs” i.e. increase profits at the expense of a lower standard of living for labor. Freeman seems to care about labor, but since Marty Feldstein is the President of the National Bureau of Economic Research and still has significant sway in Harvard Economics, it’s a tough row to hoe.

³In an earlier edition, I said they had found “voting regularities.” This was not a conscious snipe at the legitamacy of all electoral processes. However, my subconscious, if it exists, I cannot vouch for. A further apology: the post got too long to see the footnotes and get back easily. I’ve added bi-directional links to the superscripts. Hope that helps. I cribbed the basic hack from historian Roy Rosenzwieg and his bunch at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. But from the ‘no good deed goes unpunished’ file, I had to ‘title’ some links and play with the typography especially when a superscript is attached to something already carrying a link. Mousing over the links will usually tell you something about the link that does not appear in the status bar. In some other cases I’m just being ‘high spirited’.

⁴I stole that from Noam. It started out, with respect to Iranian nuclear intentions, “Intention is in the eye of the beholder’. Vision is slipperier. For example, the Project for the New American Century is some people’s idea of a vision. The medium is not the same as the message. Content matters.

Eva Perón inscribed a “child’s text” about labor now on display.