IT Director for a non-profit in Washington, DC. Man About Internet.
My Mom and Dad met Steffanie and I for lunch in Warrenton and we drove by to take a look at how the house had progressed since a few weeks ago. The roof is finished and we were able to walk through the interior. Pictures are below.
Mark Bowden, at The Atlantic writes:
Unlike nuclear weapons, the drone did not emerge from some multibillion-dollar program on the cutting edge of science. It isn’t even completely new. The first Predator drone consisted of a snowmobile engine mounted on a radio-controlled glider. When linked via satellite to a distant control center, drones exploit telecommunications methods perfected years ago by TV networks—in fact, the Air Force has gone to ESPN for advice. But when you pull together this disparate technology, what you have is a weapon capable of finding and killing someone just about anywhere in the world. An excellent long form piece on the drone program by the U.S. Government. You owe it to yourself to read this to be better informed as to how these are being used. One gem from the article that caused me to have newfound respect for Petreaus:
Cameron Munter, a veteran diplomat who was the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan from 2010 to 2012, felt that weight firsthand when he tried to push back. Munter saw American influence declining with nearly every strike. While some factions in the Pakistani military and Inter-Services Intelligence believed in the value of strikes, the Pakistani public grew increasingly outraged, and elected officials increasingly hostile. Munter’s job was to contain the crisis, a task complicated by the drone program’s secrecy, which prevented him from explaining and defending America’s actions.
Matters came to a head in the summer of 2011 during a meeting to which Munter was linked digitally. The dynamics of such meetings—where officials turned to policy discussions after the legal determination had been made—placed a premium on unified support for policy goals. Most participants wanted to focus on the success of the battle against America’s enemies, not on the corrosive foreign-policy side effects of the drone program.
At the decision meetings, it was hard for someone like Munter to say no. He would appear digitally on the screen in the Situation Room, gazing out at the vice president, the secretary of defense, and other principals, and they would present him with the targeting decision they were prepared to make. It was hard to object when so many people who titularly outranked him already seemed set.
By June of 2011, however, two events in Pakistan—first the arrest and subsequent release of the CIA contractor Raymond Davis, who had been charged with murdering two Pakistanis who accosted him on the street in Lahore, and then the Abbottabad raid that killed bin Laden—had brought the U.S.-Pakistan partnership to a new low. Concerned about balancing the short-term benefits of strikes (removing potential enemies from the battlefield) and their long-term costs (creating a lasting mistrust and resentment that undercut the policy goal of stability and peace in the region), Munter decided to test what he believed was his authority to halt a strike. As he recalled it later, the move played out as follows:
Asked whether he was on board with a particular strike, he said no.
Leon Panetta, the CIA director, said the ambassador had no veto power; these were intelligence decisions.
Munter proceeded to explain that under Title 22 of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, the president gives the authority to carry out U.S. policy in a foreign country to his ambassador, delegated through the secretary of state. That means no American policy should be carried out in any country without the ambassador’s approval.
Taken aback, Panetta replied, “Well, I do not work for you, buddy.”
“I don’t work for you,” Munter told him.
Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stepped in: “Leon, you are wrong.”
Panetta said, flatly, “Hillary, you’re wrong.”
At that point, the discussion moved on. When the secretary of state and the CIA director clash, the decision gets made upstairs.
Panetta won. A week later, James Steinberg called Munter to inform him that he did not have the authority to veto a drone strike. Steinberg explained that the ambassador would be allowed to express an objection to a strike, and that a mechanism would be put in place to make sure his objection was registered—but the decision to clear or reject a strike would be made higher up the chain. It was a clear victory for the CIA.
Later that summer, General David Petraeus was named to take over the intelligence agency from Panetta. Before assuming the job, Petraeus flew from Kabul, where he was still the military commander, to Islamabad, to meet with the ambassador. At dinner that night, Petraeus poked his finger into Munter’s chest.
“You know what happened in that meeting?” the general asked. (Petraeus had observed the clash via a secure link from his command post in Afghanistan.) “That’s never going to happen again.”
Munter’s heart sank. He thought the new CIA director, whom he liked and admired, was about to threaten him. Instead, Petraeus said: “I’m never going to put you in the position where you feel compelled to veto a strike. If you have a long-term concern, if you have a contextual problem, a timing problem, an ethical problem, I want to know about it earlier. We can work together to avoid these kinds of conflicts far in advance.”
Petraeus kept his word. Munter never had to challenge a drone strike in a principals’ meeting again during his tenure as ambassador. He left Islamabad in the summer of 2012.
Betsy Mason, at Wired's MapLab blog writes:
This map shows the paths of every hurricane and cyclone detected since 1842. Nearly 12,000 tropical cyclones have been tracked and recorded, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keeps them all in a single database. Long-term datasets can be really interesting and scientifically valuable, and this one is undoubtedly both. The map is fascinating. Check it out.
And now I would like to take some time out from my normal posts about technology, politics, and Cool Stuff I Find On The Internet™ to let you know about my wife's wonderful new website she just re-launched over on Shopify.
As you may or may not know, my wife runs a side business on her own (with minimum lifting of heavy objects help from me) in which she makes homemade soap of various types and sells at local markets. Artisanal, you might even say. Early on, she began hosting via Etsy but Esty's high fees drove her off to her own site, which I helped start on WordPress. She later found a designer to help her make it look a lot better and we were using a plugin called WooCommerce to host our own e-commmerce solution. Due to the clunkiness of this solution, and some of the fees that the payment provider that we had to use with WooCommerce, Steffanie decided she wanted to try out Shopify. With minimum help from me, over the past few weeks she has slowly migrated over and a few days ago she relaunched there.
So far I've been very impressed with the backend dashboard of Shopify and how simple it is, especially for a non-developer/designer type to use. Migrating her color scheme/theme over was very simple and it required minimal effort on my part to solve the one or two technical issues she came across (CSS tweaks ).
So far the experience has been great. Their themes are responsive and look equally great on mobile as well as desktop browsers. If you get a chance, and have a pressing need for bar soap (or other types) check out OldTownSuds.com.
Alex Altman and Zeke Miller writing for Time's Swampland:
In 2007, Barack Obama was asked when Presidents have the authority to launch a military strike without congressional authorization. He had a precise answer at the ready. “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat,” Obama told the Boston Globe. While I fully support this President's actions with regards to social policy, I am continually disappointed by his firm Republicans beliefs when it comes to national security, civil liberties and foreign policy.
This is the sort of damage that can be done to your organization when you let a "sales guy" be the CEO. David Auerbach, at Slate writes:
The stack rank was harmful. It served as an incentive not to join high-quality groups, because you’d be that much more likely to fall low in the stack rank. Better to join a weak group where you’d be the star, and then coast. Maybe the executives thought this would help strong people lift up weak teams. It never worked that way. More often, it just encouraged people to backstab their co-workers, since their loss entailed your profit. The entire performance review process at Microsoft encouraged horrendous office politics that enabled backstabbers to profit at the expense of the companies performance. The stack rank was a zero-sum game—one person could only excel by the amount that others were penalized. And it was applied at every level of the organization. Even if you were in a group of three high performers, it was very likely that one of you would be graded Above Average, one Average, and one Below Average. Unless your manager was a prick or an idiot or both, the ordering would reflect your relative skills, but that never came as too much comfort to the hard-working schlub who just wasn’t as good as the other two. Quotas. When review time came, and programmers would fill out a short self-assessment talking about their achievements, strengths, and weaknesses, only some of them knew that their ratings had been more or less already foreordained at the stack rank. The ones who knew could sometimes be recognized by their flip comments on their performance reviews, like the hot-tempered guy who wrote every year in “Areas to Improve,” “I will try to be less of an asshole.” (That guy is awesome). This sort of organizational dissembling skews your psyche. After I left Microsoft, I was left with lingering paranoia for months, always wondering about the agendas of those around me, skeptical that what I was being told was the real story. I didn’t realize until the nonstacked performance review time at my new job that I’d become so wary. At the time—inside Microsoft—it just seemed the only logical way to be. So ex-Microsoft employees are likely to be temporarily bad employees at other companies they work at until they realize the rest of the world doesn't work like the horror that is working within the Microsoft organization? Yikes.
Sarah Kliff, at The Washington Post's Wonkblog writes:
To test out this theory, a team of psychologists asked study participants how they felt about a number of mundane and unrelated subjects that included (but was not limited to) architecture, health care, crossword puzzles, taxidermy and Japan. They wanted to figure out if people tended to like or dislike things in general. This was dubbed the individual’s dispositional attitude or, more simply put, checked for whether they were a hater who pretty much hates on everything that comes across their path. Haters are gonna hate.
This is fantastic. I am floored. I cannot begin to express how much I love this. C-ville.com has produced a New York Times 'Snowfall' style local investigative piece covering a contentious local battle over a road project in central Virginia around Charlottesville. This got my attention because I frequently drive this route to go home and visit family and hate driving through this section of Charlottesville on 29 due to how much it slows me down (stoplights, congested traffic, etc). I had no idea that there was a 30 year old issue surrounding this section of road, a proposal to make a bypass around it and huge local political fight over it.
The Road
Albemarle County's three-decade fight over the Western Bypass isn't over yet
Late on the night of Wednesday, June 8, 2011, a few prominent Albemarle County real estate developers and other vocal supporters of the long-stalled plan to build a Route 29 bypass around Charlottesville strolled into Lane Auditorium at the tail end of a marathon meeting of the Board of Supervisors…. I would love to credit whomever reported on this and developed the story from a code sense. C-ville just credits its writers so it looks as if their whole news division contributed. Shockingly well produced.
Update: I've now learned that while C-ville handled all the reporting, their code monkeys appear to be Vibethink. (Twitter)