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Bush’s LBJ moment: Thomas Powers on Robert Gates

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On the eve of President Bush’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq, in March 2003, CIA historian Thomas Powers predicted, with almost spooky prescience, exactly how subsequent depressing events would unfold. So I pay a lot of attention to his analyses. Today he’s on the New York Times op-ed page with a piece that reads the tea-leaves on Bush’s nomination of Robert Gates as the new defense secretary. Rumsfeld’s resignation was widely and understandably viewed as a hopeful sign that the president was beginning to accept the reality of failure in Iraq and change policy accordingly. But Powers sees Gates’ selection as an indication that Bush is actually planning more of an LBJ-style digging in of the presidential heels:

Bad news from Baghdad and opposition at home may point to a lowering of expectations, at the very least, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Presidents take failure personally, can lift their voices above the din of opponents, and can use the immense power of their office to force events in the directions they choose.

The verdict of the elections was clear. The public wants to let Iraqis handle their own troubles from here on out, while we start bringing our soldiers home. But that’s not what President Bush has said he wants, so there will very likely be a series of fights over Iraq that will extend to the president’s last day in office. Robert Gates is smart, quiet, dogged and loyal: a well-considered choice for defense secretary by a president determined to bring home that “coonskin on the wall,” to borrow a phrase made memorable by an earlier president in a similar fix, Lyndon Johnson.

[tags]robert gates, thomas powers, iraq[/tags]

Iraq Study Group recommendation number one: Bush and Cheney should resign

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Every time I hear the words “Iraq Study Group” the phrase triggers a little involuntarily interior monologue that goes something like this:

“Study Group” — it sounds like a group of undergraduates cramming for finals. Isn’t “studying” what the Bush administration should have been doing back in 2002 and 2003 when it created the mess the Baker commission is desperately seeking a path out of today? What exactly is it that the “Study Group” is studying that the Bush White House, which appointed it, hasn’t already seen?

Hundreds of people are dying every day in Iraq, but the president has decided to let his disgraced Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, hang around a few weeks longer just so he can claim the title of “longest ever serving defense secretary.” Could there be a more ludicrous indication of how disconnected the White House has become from the carnage it has unleashed?

What options is the Study Group likely to propose — in the way of negotiations with Iraq’s neighbors, pressure on the Iraqi government, or timetables for withdrawal — that aren’t already obvious? What are we waiting for? Why are our leaders and the press splitting hairs over whether Iraq is in a state of “sectarian violence” or “civil war” or total anarchy?

The trouble is, our problems don’t lie where a “Study Group” might help, in figuring out what to do; they lie with an administration that has created a national disaster and now decided that cleaning up the disaster is not its problem at all. If you look at the coverage from Sunday’s Times exploring different roads forward for the U.S. in Iraq — “In Search of the Fixers” or the accompanying infographic — there is a strange absence of voices from the Executive Branch. After years of declaring victory and advocating “staying the course,” Bush and his team have now simply gone silent. (Or “checked out,” as Josh Marshall put it.)

It’s as if Bush, having driven the nation into a ditch, now wants to dust off his suit and walk away from the wreck. Trouble is, he’s not handing over the keys.

Now here’s something constructive the Study Group could recommend: The president needs to take responsibility for his failure and be a president for the next two years, leading the U.S. out of Iraq so it can repair its relationships with its allies, rebuild its armed forces and resume the real war we’re fighting against the group that attacked us on 9/11.

If Bush is unable to do that — and he may well be — he and his vice president should have the courage and honesty to resign. And the Baker commission should have the courage and honesty to say that to the president. In a parliamentary system, Bush and his people would have been out on their ears after this month’s election. That’s not our system — but we can improvise if we have to.

I don’t know whether, if Bush and Cheney actually did this before the new Congress takes office, Dennis Hastert would become president. After the Congressional transition, it would be Nancy Pelosi. Neither, of course, seems likely to move into the White House any time soon. But how can the country begin to move beyond our current disastrous paralysis, other than by starting with a clean sweep at the top? Are we going to spend the next two years pretending that we’re still “nation-building” and “fighting the terrorists” while American soldiers keep filling body bags and Iraqi morgues keep overflowing?
[tags]iraq, iraq study group, bush resignation[/tags]

Code Reads notes

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Within a couple of days I’ll have the next Code Reads installment ready. When I started this series I didn’t want to be rigid about following a pre-chosen list but rather to try to stay flexible — dare I say agile? — and also respond to suggestions. The result has been a longer sojourn in the thickets of somewhat long-in-the-tooth computer-science papers than I initially planned. All worth some attention, to be sure — but my hope is to provide a set of readings and discussions that touches on practice as thoroughly as on theory.

So we’re going to move in that direction for a while. Next up is Mitch Kapor’s Software Design Manifesto.

Also, that book giveaway I mentioned a while back — of five copies of Joel Spolsky’s Best Software Writing — is finally underway. Here’s how I’m doing it: (a) assemble list of people whose comments have substantively contributed to the discussions — and the contributions have almost all been thoughtful, so this means nearly all the people who’ve posted comments; (b) select names randomly from that list. If I have an email address for the lucky winners I will contact them; otherwise I’ll post the name here and ask you to email me. I’m giving away a book a week from now until they run out.

Post departures spark sinking-ship suspicions

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This week two well-known Washington Post journalists upped and quit their newsroom to start a new venture on the Net. That got tongues wagging across the blogosphere — and across the print business as well. In some quarters the action was granted watershed-like status. Brave souls striking forth from a crumbling old world into the wilderness? Or, er, rodents fleeing a listing mothership?

The hubbub simply sounds quaint to this grizzled veteran of the flight-from-print-to-Web meme. This isn’t the start of something big; it’s the latest in a long, long line of defections that have been piling up for many years. Chris Nolan notes some recent examples, including her own, in a letter to Romenesko; I flashed back somewhat further in time.

When a half-dozen of us left the S.F. Examiner newsroom en masse in 1995 to start Salon our colleagues looked at us like we were nuts. Give up good union jobs? Nobody wanted to read on the Web, anyway! John Markoff wrote in the New York Times that our departure was a harbinger of a new world in which newly independent “tribes” of journalists would break free from their corporate overlords and light out for the new territories.

I never felt very tribal, myself. I just know I’d rather help build something new and exciting than work for something old and valuable where all I could do was watch helplessly while its owners gutted and dismantled it. At Web 2.0 Roger McNamee repeated a point I’ve heard before: The newspaper industry is not doomed, it’s committing suicide. Its managers and owners have decided to “harvest” its value with 24 percent profit margins rather than invest the money to move its assets into a new era and onto a new platform.

In other words, you might say, journalists aren’t abandoning newspapers for the Web; rather, newspapers are abandoning journalism to the Web. Not all newspapers at the same pace, of course, and not all at once, and not without lots of fights. But the process is real, it has been underway for over a decade, and though it will take decades more to unfold it shows no sign of being reversible. The only thing notable about this week’s Post story is that the newsroom exodus is beginning to reach those places — like the Post, or the Times, or the Journal — where print journalism is likely to last longest.
[tags]journalism, washington post, salon, web journalism, roger mcnamee[/tags]

The reader is the writer’s collaborator

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Here’s a wonderful quotation from Zadie Smith about reading as a collaborative act (from Michael Leddy via Boingboing):

But the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, “I should sit here and I should be entertained.” And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.

And, in a comic riff on a similar theme, here’s Josh Kornbluth:

Reading is the best, because it allows/forces you to imagine an entire world. Radio is very good, because it only gives you the sounds, leaving you to supply the visuals for yourself. Television and film: well, at least they let you imagine touch and smell. But life, as we experience it, unmediated by media, leaves nothing — nothing — to the imagination.

You call that entertainment!?

Bonus Link: Steven Johnson’s great post from last year about why blogging and writing books are antithetical.
[tags]reading, writing, Zadie Smith, Josh Kornbluth, Steven Johnson[/tags]

Open source: Linux TVs and “virtual piecework”

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I recently joined the legions of Americans upgrading their TV sets, trading in my trusty and still functional (but awfully faded) 20-year-old RCA box for a fancy new Pioneer plasma display. I’m the sort of consumer-electronics purchaser who actually reads the manual; flipping through the Pioneer’s book, I nearly jumped out of my seat when I discovered the entire text of the GNU Public License. Yes, it seems that somewhere in its innards, this TV is running Linux!

In other open-source news, the Wall Street Journal ran an interesting lead piece the other day about Zimbra — the open-source challenger to Microsoft Outlook ‘n’ Exchange. I’ve followed the Zimbra saga from afar because the product is in certain ways a competitor to Chandler, the project whose story I tell in my book. (Yes, Zimbra’s name derives from the Talking Heads song, which is in turn a borrowing from Dada poet Hugo Ball.) The Journal piece, by Robert Guth, was a thorough description of how a modest-sized startup company is leveraging the work of an open-source community.

What I found strange about it wasn’t the idea that, nearly a decade after the concept of open-source software development was first introduced to the mainstream (and almost as many years after Andrew Leonard’s groundbreaking work on the subject at Salon, that I was proud to edit), the whole idea can still be framed as a novelty. No, what was really off about the piece was its headlines: “Virtual Piecework…Trolling the Web for Free Labor.”

I suppose there is still a faction in the software world that dismisses the complex social and behavioral structures that have created substantial software products like Firefox, Apache and the Linux in my TV set; in this view, open-source developers are simply chumps who give away “free labor.” And I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to find that stance echoed in the Journal. But I was anyway. Guth’s piece was a smart introduction to the process — at once idealistic and pragmatic — of distributed open-source software development; the reductive headline was jarringly disconnected from the content that followed.
[tags]open source, linux, plasma tvs, wall street journal[/tags]

Code Reads #5: Knuth’s “Structured Programming with go to Statements”

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Code ReadsThis is the fifth edition of Code Reads, a weekly discussion of some of the central essays, documents and texts in the history of software. You can go straight to the comments and post something if you like. Here’s the full Code Reads archive.

I have felt for a long time that a talent for programming consists largely of the ability to switch readily from microscopic to macroscopic views of things, i.e., to change levels of abstraction fluently.
— Donald Knuth, “Structured Programming with go to Statements”

We’ve been looking at Edsger Dijkstra’s principles of structured programming for some time now. Today we’ll conclude that phase of this series with a look at Donald Knuth’s “Structured Programming with go to Statements” (1974). Since “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” was the most famous declaration of the structured programming ethos, Knuth’s title itself was a kind of provocative joke — like naming a paper “Judaism with Idols” or “Vegetarianism with Pork Chops.” And that combination of playfulness and attentive humor extends throughout the article, from the epigraphic references to Bob Dylan (and a laxative advertisement!) on. In the middle of a complex analysis of an algorithm in ALGOL, in which Knuth is reviewing ideas for new ways to notate a particular kind of loop, he interjects:

Readers who remember 1967 will also appreciate [this] second suggestion,
turn on begin S; when B drop out; T; end.

The levity’s a good thing, because, I confess, as a non-mathematician and only a rudimentary programmer I approached Knuth’s formula-laden text with trepidation. And there remain parts of “Structured Programming with go to Statements” that are beyond me. But for the most part, this text bears out Knuth’s reputation for brilliant clarity — it’s surprisingly accessible.

[Read more…]

Miscellany: Of drapes and atheism

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I’ve been hit with the accursed virus that’s going around — not a computer bug; the sniffly, rhinovirus sort. Meanwhile, I’m working my way through Don Knuth’s “Structured Programming with go to Statements”; the Code Reads for that should be up within a day or two.

In the political world, I keep returning to the condescending fuss the GOP made before the election about Nancy Pelosi having already begun to choose her new drapes. President Bush followed up with more in his “we took a thumpin'” press conference.

And all I can think is, drapes? This election was all about pulling back drapes. Bush’s Washington has been a place of closed curtains and shut doors — from the Cheney energy panel to the secret rendition of prisoners to the zipped-up treatment of the press. Pelosi could mint some appropriate symbolism by simply leaving her windows uncovered. Whether she does so or not, let’s hope for a little more sunshine on the workings of government now that we’re no longer a one-party state.

If politics is too mundane and Iraq too depressing, go read Gary Wolf‘s wonderful Wired essay on atheism. It’s a great tour of the subject with stops at the doors of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. Wolf concludes that, although atheism is the logical and philosophically sound stance for a scientific person, there’s something off-puttingly evangelical about its most fervent advocates, and that’s why the great bulk of us non-believers tend to identify as agnostics instead.
[tags]atheism, nancy pelosi, gary wolf[/tags]

Put Windows key out of its misery

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One of the best ways to avoid wrist trouble, RSI and similar tendon-aching problems — aside from NEVER EVER cradling the phone between your shoulder and your ear! — is to minimize reaching for the mouse. (Office workers spent years at typewriters without getting RSI.) So smart people use keyboard shortcuts when they can.

But several years ago, Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, messed up the world of keyboard shortcutting by inserting a new key between the “Ctrl” and the “Alt” — the dreaded “Windows” key. This key does nothing except pop up the largely useless “Start” menu. On most desktop keyboards, it’s fairly easy to avoid. But on crowded laptop layouts, it can be hard to ignore, and I find my fingers landing on it by accident while I’m typing. Then Windows shifts its “focus” out of the active window, and even if you dismiss the Start menu, you have to click back in the window you were working in to resume whatever you were in the middle of — you can’t just keep typing.

Ugh. So I was thrilled to find this page with a handydandy registry editing script that will disable the Windows key. Highly recommended if you feel as I do. (But remember; you are editing the Windows registry. This script does the work for you, it’s pretty much click and you’re done, but if this sort of thing worries you, be warned.)
[tags]windows key, windows annoyances, lifehacks[/tags]

Web 2.0: Fear of IPOs

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This Web 2.0 conference is almost exclusively focused on the business end of the phenomenon. And the defining characteristic of this iteration of the tech-industry business cycle is that virtually no one other than Google has gone public. It’s as if the excesses of the dot-com bubble left the very term “IPO” tainted. It’s also the case that this time around, the market, very sanely, isn’t that keen on supporting IPOs for companies that haven’t demonstrated profitability. So the “exit strategy” of choice today for startup companies isn’t to go public; it’s to be acquired by Google or Yahoo (or maybe AOL or Microsoft).

Yesterday evening, Barry Diller advised a questioner who asked how you could “build value” today: “Don’t sell it. Just ride it. Equity is built by holding on. Sometime you gotta sell a little of it. But hold onto it if you have something of value.” (Here’s more on Diller’s talk.)

This advice has its limits, however. A successful Web service start up reaches a point, if it manages to attract millions of users, where it has to start getting really good at things like datacenters and customer support. Maybe that’s not what the founders are interested in. Or maybe it’s dauntingly expensive. At that point, selling out to a Google or Yahoo makes perfect sense. These companies are explicitly and unashamedly in the business of doing outsourced R&D for the big guys. That’s “building value,” too.

But staying independent is more fun. Look at GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons — a colorful ex-Marine whose “I’m just a dumb guy who flunked fifth grade” serves as cover for a shrewd business mind.

Parsons told the conference about his near-IPO experience earlier this year; he said he spent $3 million preparing his SEC filings and courting bankers, only to discover that the bankers and the financial press were focused exclusively on “short term accounting paper profits.” Parsons is a believer in operating cash flow instead. He’s proud of his company, with its 920 support reps actually answering the phone when customers call in about the domain names they’ve bought. But all he heard from the public market’s representatives was, “When are you going to get your customers to use self-help so you can cut your support staff?” So he pulled the plug on the IPO.

I cringed at Parsons’ unabashed enthusiasm for ads that plant his logo on the chests of well-endowed women (“”Because that’s where every guy would be looking”). But most Web 2.0-style execs could learn something from his understanding of the basics of retail psychology: “People love the convenience and speed that comes with the Net. But when it comes to resolving problems or learning features, people much prefer to deal with other people.”
[tags]Web 2.0, web2con, barry diller, bob parsons, ipos[/tags]