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Everyone says hi

Happy birthday Loraine, everyone says hi.

Wish you were here.

Exit Gonzales

Someday someone will publish the real story behind Alberto Gonzales. And the real story (or the interesting part of it at least) won't be about why he finally resigned, but rather why he stayed on so long.

After he staggered through the last couple of brutally punishing Senate hearings, I figured, yeah, well, the guy is just going to keep going no matter what they hit him with. Bush seemed similarly dedicated to supporting Gonzales, no matter how many holes the guy was shooting in the bottom of the lifeboat. So I was surprised when I heard the news today that Bush was finally cutting him loose.

It seems like Gonzales could have saved himself a lot of humiliation by quitting a few months ago, and Bush could have avoided some political damage if he fired him sooner. (Though one wonders if it really makes a difference if it would have raised the President's approval ratings to, say, 31-percent from 29-percent). To hear Bush publicly regret that Gonzales' "good name" was "dragged through the mud" due to political infighting leads me to believe that Bush is either truly delusional or that he just wasn't watching C-Span when Gonzales self-immolated in front of the Senate. Granted, it was pretty hard to watch. I don't think I've heard the phrase "I can't recall" so many times since Reagan was in front of Congress for the Iran-Contra hearings.

But he's gone now and the machine just keeps rolling on. I'm counting the days till January 2009 when this crippled administration finally leaves office and let's us get to the huge task of counting the cost and beginning the damage control.

The scariest thing, I believe, is that a few years ago some people were talking about Gonzales being a candidate for the open slot on the Supreme Court after Justice Sandra Day O'Connor resigned. Imagining this guy sitting in black robes on the most powerful judicial bench in the country, in a job for life from which he could not realistically be fired, just gives me the cold shivers. I guess we dodged a bullet on that one.

So that's Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Card, Rove, Myers and Gonzales gone... who's next? Who's left?? It's going to be a long slog till 2009.

Spook Country

Spook Country arrived in the mail a couple of days ago and I'm forcing myself to read it slowly - I don't want to blow straight through it and miss the details.

So far the mood feels a lot like Pattern Recognition - relatively slow pacing but a lot of attention to fine detail. In typical Gibson style, the people and objects are described at the surface level, so the reader can get a fix on their appearance or behavior, but each point of description also carries its own semiotic markers that place that person or object within a broader cultural context.

And as always, Gibson displays a laser-keen ability to sense and describe the finer points of culture - both its outward, visible manifestations and also its deeper (and almost always darker) signs and signifiers.

I'm torn because on the one hand I really want to finish the book by next Thursday when I'll be at that book club in Vancouver with him and Deborah, but it would be a pity to tear through this thing too quickly.

Hey by the way Deborah, if you're reading this, did you see the dedication he wrote before the introduction? Anything you want to share with us?

Welcome home Endeavour

Welcome home Endeavour, glad you're back safe.

Quagmire

This YouTube clip was brought to my attention by Mary Ann Akers' 'Sleuth' column on the Washington Post. Wouldn't have believed it if I wasn't watching it myself.

It's a minute-long clip of Dick Cheney in 1994, just after he was defense secretary under Daddy Bush, giving some pretty damn good reasons why Daddy Bush was right to stop the first Gulf War before the US took Baghdad.

I could go on about this but you really need to see it for yourself. What's truly terrifying about this bit is the precision with which he saw this nightmare coming, and went through with it anyway.

William Gibson

Deborah from Vancouver just won two tickets to the CBC Radio Studio One Book Club on September 6. Guest of honor will be William Gibson, who will talk about his new book Spook Country.

So Deb knew that I'm a huge Gibson fan, and I'll be in Seattle on the 6th, so she offered me the other ticket! I'm going to meet Gibson again! I just ordered the book from Amazon.co.uk, so hope to have the thing next week. More than enough time to read it before the book club, given the long flight and long nights in the hotel in Seattle.

Here's my Gibson interview from San Francisco in 99, for the All Tomorrow's Parties tour, now on the Sci Fi Channel site.

Merci Deborah, thanks for the ticket. Trés magnifique!

Hardball

Busy news day.

Something’s cooking in the American relationship with Russia and Iran, but I can’t figure out what it is yet. Condi just put the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the State Department list of terrorist organizations. The Revolutionary Guards isn’t some kind of splinter group within the Iranian regime, these guys are big-time. The Guards started out in 1979 as the new government’s elite military arm and “guardian of the revolution.”

The organization has grown in military, political and economic power since then, and the group now has its own army, navy, air force, special forces and intelligence services, parallel to and separate from the mainline Iranian chain of command. They also control the Iranian long range missile forces. Like the Chinese military, the IRGC is loaded with cash from their own sources and deeply involved in the Iranian economy through investment and ownership of companies in different industries (I guess you can call that ‘diversification’).

So by calling the IRGC terrorists, we’re hurling that anathema at a significant chunk of the Iranian power structure. It’s the first time a branch of a foreign government has been added to the State Department list. This doesn’t affect the US very much because almost no US citizens are doing any kind of business with Iran, but foreign companies could be affected if they have business deals with Iranian companies that happen to be partly owned by the IRGC. In that case, American companies would be obligated to stop doing business with those foreign companies. Indirectly, this can hurt the Iranians.

The IRGC has been accused of supporting fringe Shiite militias that have attacked American forces in Iraq. There is some evidence that the IRGC has been exporting advanced anti-vehicle devices into Iraq, such as the ‘explosively formed penetrators’ that are capable of taking out even American tanks. OK, that’s some very bad mojo.

But here is where it gets complicated - for years the IRGC has also been giving military & financial support to the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC). This is one of the two major Shiite groups in Iraq, and their military arm, the Badr Organization (formerly known as the ‘Badr Brigade’) is the one that has been working most closely with US forces (it would be more correct to say they are ‘less hostile’ to US forces than some other groups).

For a while there was open warfare between the Badr Brigade and the other major Iraqi Shiite group, the nominally more extremist Mahdi Army under Muqtada al Sadr. You don’t hear much about al Sadr in the US press any more, but from the accounts I’ve seen, he’s still in place and still just as powerful and dangerous as he was when he was the driving force behind the resistance in Najaf in 2004.

One further wrinkle in this mess is that al Sadr supports our biggest ally in Iraq, Prime Minister al Maliki, and in fact the Iraqi government would collapse if al Sadr pulled out. But I don’t think that makes al Sadr or the Mahdi Army any less dangerous. I think we can expect more trouble from him in the future since al Maliki’s administration is falling apart, and he may not last the year. There is no love lost between al Sadr and the US, and the US would probably like to see him liquidated or exiled. But by putting the IRGC on the terrorist list, we’re arguably putting sanctions on the funders of the enemy of our enemy. This seems like a strange decision.

So where do the Russians come in? Well, in all areas save one, Russia appears to be flexing its muscles. The country is flush with cash from its oil exports. Russia is putting increasing political pressure on its ‘near abroad,’ such as the aggressive moves towards Georgia, the political meddling in Ukraine, the cyber attacks against Estonia and the support of pro-Russian separatist movements in South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Trans-Dniestr and Nagorno-Karabakh. Russia just completed an undersea mission to claim sovereignty over parts of the Arctic Ocean. They announced they’re withdrawing from the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (not that the CFE is very relevant any more). They’re upgrading their strategic missile forces and producing a new defensive anti-missile system. Putin is warning about a new Cold War. Russia seems to be strident in all areas except one – Iran.

As I mentioned in February on my other blog Diplomacy, Russia has stopped work on the nuclear reactor at Bushehr, which is a huge deal for Iran. And they’re being remarkably silent about American aggressive behavior against their nominal Iranian allies, and I haven’t heard any shouting from Moscow about this latest terrorist list business.

I can’t figure out what the quid pro quo is for Putin? What has Bush given up in order to keep the Russians acquiescent over Iran? Some kind of sub rosa deal is the only explanation I can think of for this behavior. But I still haven’t yet seen any significant change in US policy towards Russia that could account for it, and as the language heats up, Putin’s silence becomes even more remarkable.

Stay tuned.

Rove quits

Whoa. Some had predicted this but I didn't think it was going to happen - Karl Rove, Bush's chief political advisor, just announced he's quitting.

You can already hear the politics junkies begin to ask if he jumped or was he pushed?

Ironically, he's using the same excuse as disgraced former CIA Director George Tenet used when he "retired." Rove said he needs to spend more time with his family. That's usually Washingtonspeak for "The President just canned my ass."

Rove said he's going to write a book now. I'd actually like to read that & see what he has to say.

Get back to work!

Well, tonight is my last night of vacation after having two weeks off. Cec and I didn't go anywhere, which was actually quite nice. It was great to just catch up on sleep, relax around the place and get our heads away from work for a while.

After that crazy month bouncing city to city in the US, it felt like a miracle to have some sustained time to sleep and read, and after spending most of the first week depressurizing I picked up this book I've been trying to write again. I got about 20 pages pounded out, which has been an amazing feeling. I tied off one of the character development flashbacks and can now fuse that back in to the main story and get back to building tension.

The thing is still less than half done, at best - this one character was supposed to be the love interest for the protagonist and I hadn't planned to give her that much detail. But I ended up getting into a lot of research on Soviet-era Estonia and the SSR apparat (she's Estonian and her parents were SSR nomenklatura back in the day), so I got into this big digression and just couldn't stop expanding on her.

Fox knows how long it's going to take me to finish this thing, considering how long it's taken so far. After spending more than a week working at it, I know I could actually get it done if I was allowed some sustained time like this to focus on it. But alas, the world doesn't work that way.

No regrets. There are some hopefully exciting changes coming up with the company soon (more on that later), and it will be good to dive back in and get some of this off the ground.

Whose Space?

Diving yet further into the mainstream, I've been getting a few requests from friends to join My Space, so I decided to take a look at reactivating my dormant account.

I'm not without some experience at interface design and web design in general, but I still haven't made much headway after playing with it for a couple of hours trying to set up my profile. And all the online ads and random content windows splashed capriciously across the screen are causing me to frown and regret the day I was born.

How about some straight HTML? Please? Maybe it's just me that can't get this?

I guess if I was 14 years old the process would be completely intuitive.

Da Vinci Decoded

Finished The Da Vinci Code. It was good, for light bedtime reading or flight fodder. And it did motivate me to spend some time on Wikipedia looking up the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei, etc. (Don't do this until you've finished the book - you'll want to keep your suspension of disbelief intact.)

Just because something's hugely popular doesn't mean it should automatically be written off as "bad." Which reminds me, I promised Hannah to read the next in the Harry Potter series before the next movie comes out.

First I'm going back to Burroughs though.

The Da Vinci Code

So yeah, I gave in and started reading The Da Vinci Code. The plot is tight and the research is thorough. You could hardly ask for more interesting subject matter. The writing is contrived though, with really short chapters that all end with a cliffhanger. It's a bit like reading a screenplay rather than a novel, as if he was already anticipating the film treatment when he was writing the book. (Crichton writes like this too).

Still, for a quick read it's not bad so far. I haven't seen the movie but may do so if I get a chance.

American News

As I mentioned before, I just got back from more than a month on the road in the US. I have to admit that after the first couple of days trying to watch the US version of CNN, or MSNBC, or fuck-help-me-anything besides Fox News, I gave up and just tried to catch a glimpse of a newspaper whenever I got the chance.

Which is what happens every time I go to the States.

At least I see I'm not alone - Warren Ellis just wrote an eloquent piece on the US news engine over at Suicide Girls that wraps up precisely what it feels like. Key excerpt:

Given the time, CNN and their kin can present the news in such a way that it makes no sense to anyone, and increases no-one’s understanding of current events and the times they live in. I spent nine days in America this time, and it felt like I was in a bottle lost on the tide. I’m still catching up on what happened in the world over those nine days. All I know about that time is that Lindsay Lohan is the Road Warrior and the Space Shuttle can be flown while shitfaced.

Spook Country

Just got the notice from Amazon.co.uk that Spook Country is now available!

I can't decide whether to get it now or wait till I get to the States. I've already got a huge pile of books I haven't read yet, and I should probably get through some of those so I'll have less to ship to Seattle when the time comes.

But still, it's hard to pass up a new Gibson book!