Happy Thanksgiving!

For fun:

What part of Thanksgiving are you?

You Are the Stuffing

http://www.quizdiva.net/bt/stuffing.jpg

You’re complicated and complex, yet all your pieces fit together.
People miss you if you’re gone – but they’re not sure why.
http://www.blogthings.com/thanksgivingquiz.html">What Part of Thanksgiving Are You?

My husband has been out of town since Wednesday.  I get to pick him up today.  yay!

Had a good riding lesson this morning despite gale force winds that made every flapping thing look like a horse-eating monster.  Once we really started working, the horses weren’t interested in scary things outside the arena.  I rode Goldie again.  We’re doing a lot better together.  I’m figuring out what she needs to get over jumps smoothly and in a straight line.  We had a few ugly jumps but I stayed in the saddle and we fixed the problems.

My trainer and I are making plans to drive out to a barn two hours from here on Friday to look at a lovely warmblood mare.  That’s all I’m saying on that subject for now.

That was the fun stuff.  Here’s something we need to consider when thinking about the war on terrorism.  For one thing, how exactly are terrorist activities defined?  It seems like the experts can’t agree.  Have terrorist attacks diminished?  Or not?  The experts can’t agree on that either.  Why were some activities counted and other excluded?  Why were some counted once and other counted per incident?  Here’s the article from this morning’s LA Times:

THE NATION

Doubts Fly on Terror Report’s Reliability

The State Department finds that flaws in what is supposed to be a definitive analysis of the global threat go much deeper than suspected.

By Josh Meyer
Times Staff Writer

November 21, 2004

WASHINGTON — Five months after embarrassed State Department officials acknowledged widespread mistakes in the government’s influential annual report on global terrorism, internal investigators have found new and unrelated errors — as well as broader underlying problems that they say essentially have destroyed the credibility of the statistics the report is based on.

In a 28-page report, the State Department’s Office of Inspector General blamed the problems on sloppy data collection, inexperienced employees, personnel shortages and lax oversight. Investigators also concluded that the procedures used by the State Department, CIA and other agencies to define terrorism and terrorist attacks were so inconsistent that they couldn’t be relied upon.

The department’s independent investigative unit concluded, however, that politics played no role in allowing so many mistakes to be published in the original version of the "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report for 2003.

The 2003 report said that terrorist attacks and related deaths had dropped to the lowest levels in three decades, and top Bush administration officials immediately cited it as proof of their success in the global war on terrorism.

But the underlying data actually showed a sharp increase, to a 21-year high. The 199-page report, made public April 29, also omitted any significant terrorist attacks occurring after an early November cutoff date, including bombings in Turkey that killed at least 62 people, and left out some terrorist activity in Chechnya, Iraq and other locations.

Those errors were fixed in a second version of the terrorism report, released June 22. But six Democratic senators, suggesting that the administration was manipulating terrorism statistics for election-year political gain, asked Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to find out what had gone wrong, prompting the investigation by the inspector general. A copy of the inspector general’s conclusions, marked "sensitive but unclassified", was obtained by The Times.

The annual report has been mandated by Congress since 1987 as the government’s primary reference tool on worldwide terrorist activity, trends and groups and the U.S. response to them.

The document is relied on by Congress and U.S. counter-terrorism agencies in deciding how to fight terrorism, and is translated into at least four languages so the public, academics and foreign governments can use it to assess global trends.

The investigators, overseen by the State Department’s acting inspector general, Cameron R. Hume, stopped short of calling for a second revision of the widely circulated report. But they concluded that the report, even in its revised form, "cannot be viewed as reliable" because of the questionable statistics on terrorist attacks, casualties and other issues. The report urged better oversight and management of the annual terrorism report card.

A State Department spokesman declined to comment publicly on the internal report, but said the department had no plans to review or reissue the 2003 "Patterns" document a second time. The official said the State Department already was moving to overhaul the way it compiled terrorism statistics.

"We think it’s best to just move on, and make sure we fix what needs to be fixed," the official said.

On Friday, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), one of the lawmakers who requested the investigation, said the lack of objective benchmarks to measure terrorist activity jeopardized the campaign against terrorism.

"Either through indifference or incompetence … these errors have damaged the credibility of this important assessment, undermining our ability to determine what policies and programs are effective in fighting terrorism," Leahy said.

A senior congressional official said the inspector general’s findings confirmed what experts had been saying for years — that the annual "Patterns" report was seriously flawed as a tool to measure progress in the war on terrorism or analyze the rapidly changing nature of terrorism.

"We become the laughingstock if we redo it. But [not doing it] poses a serious credibility problem," said the official, a terrorism analyst on Capitol Hill. "This determines where we put our resources, what we tell other countries, what we think the trends are. And this just ruins our credibility. People just don’t trust us anymore."

Michael Kraft, a senior counter-terrorism official in the State Department until earlier this year, defended the annual "Patterns" report as immensely valuable, and said it was almost impossible to be entirely accurate given all of the variables that went into analyzing terrorism.

"It’s not always easy. The numbers themselves don’t always mean a great deal. They have to be put in context," Kraft said. "Even with the best of efforts — and a lot of time and work goes into it — there is always going to be a certain amount of fuzziness."

In their internal report, State Department investigators pinned much of the blame for the 2003 problems on the transition to the government’s new interagency Terrorist Threat Integration Center, which last year took over from the CIA responsibility for the terrorism database used to compile statistics for the annual report.

During the transition, investigators concluded, there were gaps in data entry, inadequate oversight, staff shortages and personnel changes that resulted in a lack of trained, long-term employees. In particular, the CIA-based manager of the database unit left in December 2003, but was not replaced until April 2004.

Kraft described many of the problems as "teething pains" inevitable in a new agency.

But investigators identified more systemic shortcomings, particularly a long-standing failure by the State Department, CIA and other agencies to use consistent standards to identify and classify terrorism-related events.

For example, some multiple bombings in the same city — such as bomb attacks March 25, 2003, on four U.N. police stations in Pristina, Serbia, and attacks on two embassies in Caracas, Venezuela, on Feb. 25 — were counted as single terrorism incidents.

But grenade attacks on two targets in Kashmir on April 12, and bomb attacks on two synagogues in Istanbul on Nov. 15, were each listed as two terrorism incidents.

Additionally, some items were included or dropped without apparent reason. The discovery of an explosive device at an IBM facility in Italy on March 31 was deleted without explanation from the second version of the 2003 report. But a parcel bomb hidden in a book that was sent to the Greek Consulate in Madrid on Sept. 8 was added to the revised version.

Investigators said no records or minutes were kept to explain how these decisions were made. Thus officials "could only speculate on why some events were included or not included," according to the report.

Meanwhile, there appear to be obvious inconsistencies within the revised 2003 report, said another congressional staff member.

Among them: the corrected report lists 2,738 people as casualties of international terrorist attacks in 2002 in one section, but 3,072 casualties in a separate statistical review.

Long-standing guidelines, meanwhile, have not kept pace with changes in terrorism.

The report considers international terrorism to be violence against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents and which involves citizens of two or more countries.

This effectively omitted countless incidents in Chechnya, and more recently in Iraq, even though the Bush administration contended that Iraq was now at the heart of the terrorism war.

If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.

Article licensing and reprint options

Some unsettling headlines today include Greenspan’s warning that foreign investors may dump the dollar (i.e. sell any U.S. bonds stock) because of the huge and growing deficit.  If this happens, and why wouldn’t they since these bonds are becoming junk bonds, our economy will take a bigger, maybe massive hit. I wish this was surprising news but anyone with a teeny tiny bit of knowledge about economics could have made this prediction.

Here’s another article from the Seattle P.I.  The article itself leaves out a tremendous amount of important ecological information about oceans.  In one sentence it mentions air and water pollution, overfishing and coastal development but it doesn’t bother to say how this commission is going to address those issues or why they need to be addressed, which seems typical.  No wonder that those of us who read newspapers feel like we don’t know what’s going on.

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/200493_oceans20.html

Bush unlikely to back ocean reform

Critics fear they’ll get no protections, just status quo

Saturday, November 20, 2004

By JOAN LOWY
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE

Despite warnings that the nation’s ocean territories are facing an ecological crisis, President Bush is unlikely to endorse major reforms in federal oceans management recommended by a landmark commission.

James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, has been spearheading an interagency effort to respond to more than 200 recommendations made by the congressionally mandated U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, whose members were appointed by Bush.

That response is tentatively scheduled to be unveiled on Dec. 20, but commission members and oceans experts who have been closely following the interagency effort said it appears the White House will not propose the key reforms or seek the significant increases in funding recommended by the commission.

Instead, the White House appears to be leaning toward "giving us a menu of all the wonderful things they are doing right now and saying they believe they can handle it within the current (government) structure and so forth," said retired Adm. James Watkins, a former secretary of energy who was chairman of the oceans commission.

"We would be very upset to see the status quo being delivered publicly as an adequate response," Watkins said.

The council has listed on its Web site dozens of government programs and policies that address various aspects of ocean management, implying that the administration is well on its way to addressing the commission’s recommendations.

However, ocean reform advocates described the lists as window dressing on the current governmental structure, which spreads ocean-related responsibilities across 15 federal departments and agencies.

The commission called for an "ecosystem-based management approach" that crosses jurisdictional boundaries to address problems as varied as air and water pollution, overfishing and coastal land development. Existing programs to manage oceans and coasts are badly fragmented, the commission said.

"The commission is handing the president the opportunity to be the Teddy Roosevelt of the oceans. They deserve more than a drive-by shooting as a response," said Warner Chabot, vice president of the Ocean Conservancy.

Connaughton said the criticism is premature since the administration is still working on its response to the commission.

The administration is making "some really tangible progress" on the commission’s recommendations, which is "a great step forward, especially given where we started," Connaughton said. "Before we took office there was no action."

The commission’s report was released in draft form last year; finalized and publicly presented this spring; and formally sent to the White House with comments from the nation’s governors this fall. Yet, Bush has said almost nothing publicly about the report, even while he was campaigning for re-election in coastal states most directly affected by over fishing, pollution and general degradation plaguing the oceans.

One of the commission’s top recommendations was the creation of a presidential assistant dedicated exclusively to oceans. The commission said it was critical to have an advocate in the White House for the nation’s 4.4 million square miles of ocean territory, an area 20 percent larger than the land area of the United States. U.S. jurisdiction extends 200 miles from coasts.

The commission also recommended the creation of a National Ocean Council within the office of the president and composed of Cabinet department and federal agency heads to provide high-level attention to ocean issues.

Connaughton, an attorney who represented major manufacturers and oil and mining companies before he was tapped by Bush to head the environmental council, said he is functioning as the White House’s ocean adviser and may continue to serve in that role.

© 1998-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

I’m happy it’s Friday because I do not really want to be here on campus today.  Last night I started with the attitude and even took careful inventory of myself to see if I was developing any symptoms for communicable diseases.  No such luck, which is a terrible thing to wish.  However, that’s where I’m at today.

I’m very sore because I rode a difficult horse Wednesday evening.  We argued about everything I asked him to do.  At the end of the lesson, the instructor set up a jump for me and said the horse was very honest over jumps.  Why, I asked, when he’s not honest about anything else?  Apparently he likes to jump and he went right over those jumps with no argument.

Then I rode a horse on Thursday morning that I had never ridden before.  He’s not a school horse but owned by a client of my trainer.  I’m not sure why I got to ride him but it was a nice change from Goldie.  Monty is probably about 17 hh — his withers are over my head and I’m 5’8".  He’s fairly athletic but "looks" at jumps he could easily step over.  He stopped once and awkwardly jumped a couple times when I jabbed him at the last second when I should’ve had my leg on him earlier.  In any event, my trainer told me I rode him well for it being my first time on him.  Maybe I’m getting this jumping thing figured out finally.

Last week I was so disgusted with the way my pants felt that I joined Weight Watchers.  I had joined the program earlier in the year and had lost 8 pounds but I was hungry and grumpy all the time.  This time I really had to do something.  It’s been easier for some reason.  I haven’t had any cravings.  Today is difficult because I don’t want to be here and my answer to avoiding work I don’t want to do is eating.  Thanks to WW I have my food all planned out so there’s not much chance of over doing it.  Granted, I could eat my lunch at 9:30 a.m. but who wants baked ziti in the morning?  Not me.  So I decided to blog instead.  I am proud to report that I lost 2 pounds last week.  All I really need to do is do some unpleasant chores for a little over an hour then I go to class, which will be a nice distraction for a change.  Okay, I can handle an hour.

A friend of mine provided this quote:

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more

and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and

glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts’

desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright

moron."

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

Yay for democracy.

Happy Veteran’s Day everyone.  How are you remembering the veterans?  I am remembering the 1000 + Americans who have been killed in Iraq and hope the 140,000 troops over there can come home to their families soon.

Earlier today I saw 10 jets flying in formation.  At first I though they were a small flock of geese but then I noticed the exhaust trails.

Did you know that Veteran’s Day, the 11th day of the 11th month falls on the end of WWI date, the war to end all wars?  Unfortunately we’ve had several since then: WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afganistan, and now Iraq.

… because I can’t stop.

SpecialK has a direct point of view on morality in this election… I can’t agree more.

http://sorryeverybody.com/

Click on the gallery menu and view all the pictures of people who are sorry about the election.

The following is an article in New Republic:

51-48
by the Editors
Post date 11.04.04 | Issue date 11.15.04

This hurts. The convictions and the dreams of American liberalism have genuinely failed to carry the day; and so, for the sake of liberalism, but also for the sake of America, it is the hour for making
discriminations among the varieties of despair.

There certainly are grounds for despair. In their first term, without a
popular mandate, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney governed in a radically sectarian manner, in conformity with only the wishes of their hallowedbase; and there is no reason to think that the popular mandate that they have now secured for a second term will provoke them to reconsider their virulence and their smallness and their indifference to the evidence of experience beyond their own In the aftermath of this election, the president speaks about unifying the country, but he spoke that way in the aftermath of the last election, and he became the most spectacular disuniter of America in contemporary history. We must not expect the Bush administration to rise above its theology, its secrecy, its instrumental attitude toward the courts, its sympathy for the rich, its economicist approach to health care, its easy conscience about the exploitation of the environment, its belief in its own infallibility, its regular sensation of perfection. There is no sign that the Bush administration has any good idea about how to correct its course in Iraq or to put an end once and for all to Osama bin Laden; or that it regards anti-Americanism as a serious impediment to American values and American interests abroad. The Bush administration may now be expected to behave triumphally and (as the talking heads say) to move forward with its agenda. Hard times, brutish times, lie ahead.

But there is a kind of despair, a glamorous pessimism, that liberals
must at all costs avoid. The cartography of the electoral college may
show a continent of red with some blue lesions at the extremities; but the popular vote in the election of 2004 was 51 percent for Bush and 48 for Kerry, and those are not the numbers of a political or
philosophical rout. Fifty-one to forty-eight: Those are the numbers, rather, of a conspicuously unclear and unthrilling Democratic candidate, whose advantage in money did not offset a disadvantage in authenticity. But the important point is that, all the healing pieties of the morning after notwithstanding, this is a country divided against itself about many matters of first principle. The diversity of worldviews upon which we pride ourselves is haunting us. In such a welter of fundamental differences, the work of argument and organization becomes even more necessary. American liberalism did not die on November 2. It merely lost an election.

There is honor, moreover, in a certain kind of loss. In our distracted
and accelerated and gamed society, with its religion of winning, we
sometimes forget this. But the many millions of Americans who believe that the tax code should be more fair; and that one of the ends of government is to bother itself about its neediest and least fortunate citizens; and that the morality of the market is not all the morality that a society requires; and that the Bible is not the basis of a democratic political order, or of our political order; and that robust stem-cell research, and science more generally, is a primary social good; and that gay marriage is a question of equality and not the beginning of the end of civilization; and that American troops must not be sent to war ignorantly or dogmatically, or without the means to win; and that the good reputation of the United States in the world is one of its most powerful historical instruments–the many millions of Americans who believe these things are not wrong. They are merely not a majority. But they are a very large minority.

This is not to say that the wounding outcome of this election should fill liberals with a sense of their own purity. Not everybody to the left of Bush is like everybody else to the left of Bush; and it would be catastrophic for the Democratic Party to wallow now in the sort of Michael Moore leftishness that made many Americans worry whether John Kerry was sufficiently obsessed with American security, and sufficiently excited about American power, to protect them at home and to promote their purposes abroad. (On the question of American power, the American people are right and Ted Kennedy is wrong.) An internecine quarrel must now begin. But it cannot begin where there is only alienation, and the self-fulfilling confusion of the Bush administration with the United States of America. This country is bigger than its every president. This Constitution is not easy to destroy. This is not the apocalypse. But it is the most formidable challenge to American liberalism in our time.

While it was never my intention to turn this blog into yet political opinion mouthpiece, nonetheless this is the direction it is going.  This election is the major thing on my mind these days.  No more whining about grad school.  Maybe I’ll throw in a bit about the horselife now and again.  By the way, Velveeta didn’t work out.  She has really nice ground manners and was fine riding as long as I didn’t ask her to do anything under saddle.  If I asked for anything beyond a walk, she’d lay her ears back and toss her head in the air.  Yet she would eventually canter and jump all the jumps I pointed her to.  Once she got going, however, she was difficult to stop.  I’d finish the ride feeling as though I had been in a wrestling match.  I don’t have any more immediate prospects but am pursuing two I saw in equine sales publications.

Back to the rant: naturally I did a lot of reading prior to the election but I’m doing even more reading now about what people think went wrong.  There’s been a fair amount of opinion pieces that suggested that Kerry was too wooden, not charismatic enough, etc.  In other words, apparently he just had the wrong personality.  It’s unfortunate if our presidency comes down to personality and not important issues.  I refuse to believe that this election was lost because Kerry just isn’t likeable or charismatic or intelligent enough.  I’ve not heard or read anything that characterizes Bush as having any of those personality traits, yet he got the popular vote this time.

Before the election I read this article by the editor in American Conservative magazine, which is not my normal read.  While this article gave me some hope that sensible Republicans were concerned about real issues, like the economy, the deficit, the way Bush waged war, etc., it was pretty clear that this article was not going to be read by Field and Stream magazine readers, nor possibly by fundamentalist Christians.

I can’t say I was entirely surprised by the election but I felt incredibly let down afterward.  There is a fair amount of press about the God/Guns/Gays Republican vote.  That worries me because the issues that are a threat to our nation, like the economy, health care, the 1,000 plus American lives (and 100,000 lives of Iraqis) lost in a war that had nothing to do with 9/11, the deficit, the undermining of our pollution laws, backward energy policies, and so on took a back seat to religion and morality.

I’m surprised that so many people think that morality can be legislated.  It didn’t work during prohibition, and it’s not working in our so-called War on Drugs.  Let natural selection work here — if it’s harming only themselves then let it.  If it’s benefiting them, then great.  Legislation doesn’t stop people from breaking the law.  And please, keep that fundamentalist brand of Christianity to yourselves!  I believe that Jesus’ most important teachings were to love others as we love ourselves, even if we don’t approve.  It’s not my job as a Christian to approve.  It’s my job to love.

While I was driving around today, I caught a snippet of an interview on the radio by someone who claimed he was not "one of those God/Guns/Gays Republicans".  I really wish I would’ve heard the interview but unfortunately I was driving to a new eye doctor’s place and was paying more attention to where I was going.  Granted that was good, but I really wanted to hear why he thought Bush was still fit to lead our country.  I do want to hear both sides, especially the side that is one of those other kind of Republican.  I don’t need to hear the God/Guns/Gay argument.  Even though I’m a heterosexual, married, Christian, I do not believe that gay marriage is immoral nor a threat to heterosexual marriage.  This issue is about loving and accepting people who we may not understand and treating them as equals to ourselves.  Wouldn’t Jesus do that?

Here’s another piece I really liked.  It makes me believe that compassionate education is the answer for the next election.