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From the NY Times:

The two biggest U.S. warehouse retail chains are limiting how much rice customers can buy because of what Sam’s Club, a division of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., called on Wednesday ”recent supply and demand trends.”…

Sam’s Club said it will limit customers to four bags at a time of imported jasmine, basmati and long grain white rice.

”At the present time, BJ’s Wholesale Club is not limiting the amount of rice purchases made by our members, but, due to the current market situation, that could change at any time,” spokeswoman Sharyn Frankel said in a statement.

We’re rationing food? In the US?

Related: The End of Cheap Food

From USA Today:

In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday, 28% of Americans approve of the job Bush is doing; 69% disapprove. The approval rating matches the low point of his presidency, and the disapproval sets a new high for any president since Franklin Roosevelt.

The previous record of 67% was reached by Harry Truman in January 1952, when the United States was enmeshed in the Korean War.

Bush’s rating has worsened amid “collapsing optimism about the economy,” says Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies presidential approval. Record gas prices and a wave of home foreclosures have fueled voter angst.

Bush also holds the record for the other extreme: the highest approval rating of any president in Gallup’s history. In September 2001, in the days after the 9/11 attacks, Bush’s approval spiked to 90%. In another record, the percentage of Americans who say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake reached a new high, 63%, in the latest poll.

I’d love to know what 28% percent of Americans approve of.

From the NY Times’ remarkable article detailing the Pentagon’s use of supposedly neutral military television analysts to push a pre-planned government agenda, often involving misinformation:

Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

Though many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per appearance, in Pentagon meetings they sometimes spoke as if they were operating behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, “the Chris Matthewses and the Wolf Blitzers of the world.” Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon copies of their correspondence with network news executives. Many — although certainly not all — faithfully echoed talking points intended to counter critics.

This is not the Bravia José Gonazalez / Bouncing Balls commercial redux, but it’s still a good manufactured wonder-moment. However their is a tragic difference between the two ads done by Fallon London for Sony. In the Bravia ad, they used beauty and whim to sell a better way to see those moments (televisions). In this new commercial, they are using foaming spilling through Miami to sell recording devices (video and digital cameras). Sony is trying to sell the idea that those moments must be documented, not just experienced.

I fall prey to that mentality often, missing experiences that will never happen again so that I can try to record them for posterity. Look around today and you’ll find observers and engagers alongside a smaller number of recorders and creators. But that balance is tipping. The recorders are an ever-growing body, and will soon outnumber the others. That instability will greatly diminish the value, and therefore the appeal, of engaging, observing and creating.

The commercial is pretty, and the idea of Miami temporarily turning to foam is charming. But the idea of a society compelled to invest in recording everything to confer value on beauty and whim is terrifying.

From the NY Times in 2004:

The torch relay that culminates in the ceremonial lighting of the flame at the Olympic stadium was ordered by Adolf Hitler, who tried to make the 1936 Berlin Games a celebration of the Third Reich. Hitler’s Nazi propaganda machine also popularized the five interlocking rings as the symbol of the Games.

Now, both are universally recognized icons of the Olympics. But historians say neither had much, if anything, to do with the Games born centuries ago in ancient Olympia.

“The torch relay is so ingrained in the modern choreography that most people today assume it was a revival of a pagan tradition - unaware that it was actually concocted for Hitler’s Games in Berlin,” the author Tony Perrottet wrote in “The Naked Olympics” (Random House, 2004).

Perrottet added, “Ironically, considering its repellent origins, the torch race has come to symbolize international brotherhood today, and remains a centerpiece of our own pomp-filled Olympic opening ceremonies.”

This week in Time:

[The Chinese internal security guarding the torch’s] presence has only exacerbated the protests that surround the relay, says Steve Tsang, a China specialist at Oxford University. “It is very much self-inflicted damage to China’s position in the international community,” he says. “In any event you’d have protests … but the scale became much bigger when interest groups knew beforehand that they would be guaranteed prime-time television coverage. What was the Chinese government thinking? How could it send the People’s Armed Police to beat up protesters, even push around foreign celebrities holding the torch, and not attract even more attention?”

More on the history of the torch at Wikipedia.

Flickr just launched a micro-video service last night, allowing users to post short, small video alongside their photos. Their focus is presumably on short notes that would naturally fit the consumption patterns of the photo-surfing world.

It’s a smart strategic move to pick a niche video market, since there’s little point in trying to recreate Youtube. All credit to them for picking a smart market to focus on.

However, less smart was their decision to completely rip the interface Vimeo has used for their videos. Sure there’s so little to the interface, but that’s part of the genius of Vimeo’s work. There is surely more than one way to skin a video player, and Flickr has failed mightily in taking such a cheap route (or perhaps in so poorly vetting the solution their executives accepted).

People have long said Vimeo was Flickr for videos, presumably because both recognized the importance of user interface and ease-of-use. In fact, that comparison should have been considered an honor. But now we can say that Flickr is like Vimeo for videos, which should be noted is far less complementary.

Yesterday, the memos written by John Yoo that became the executive branch’s rationalization for torture, among other things, became public. The 81 page brief provides the rationale the executive branch employed (provided by a junior lawyer at the justice department) for unsettling scores of years of established law and engaging in torture. Commentary abounds.

Vanity Fair has written a breath-taking account of America’s role in torture. In 2006 Bush signed the Military Commissions Act, protecting the leaders involved from any future criminal prosecution. The VF article concludes with the consideration that blanket immunity exposes these government leaders and lawyers to war crimes prosecution internationally. One of the stipulations for international prosecution of war crimes is that the country of residence of the alleged law-breakers would not prosecute on their own. So by providing absolution from American prosecution, Rumsfeld, Bush, Yoo, etc are now exposed to prosecution by the world.

I can’t say whether the American government would ever allow high ranking administration officials to be prosecuted for such heinous acts. Then again, under Nixon’s presidency high ranking officials were prosecuted for Whitewater, his vice president resigned amidst bribery and tax evasion charges and ultimately Nixon himself stepped down.

At present no ranking officials have been held accountable for any actions ranging from gross intelligence failures leading up to 9/11, the complete mischaracterization of Iraq’s involvement to generate a war, or the American sponsored torture of prisoners.

I almost long for the days of our more moral corruption.

From the New Yorker

A penny minted before 1982 is ninety-five per cent copper—which, at recent prices, is approximately two and a half cents’ worth. Luhrman, who had previously owned a company that refined gold and silver, devised a method of rapidly separating pre-1982 pennies from more recent ones, which are ninety-seven and a half per cent zinc, a less valuable commodity. His new company, Jackson Metals, bought truckloads of pennies from the Federal Reserve, turned the copper ones into ingots, and returned the zinc ones to circulation in cities where pennies were scarce. “Doing that prevented the U.S. Mint from having to make more pennies,” Luhrman told me recently. “Isn’t that neat?” The Mint didn’t think so; it issued a rule prohibiting the melting or exportation of one-cent and five-cent coins. (Nickels, despite their silvery appearance, are seventy-five per cent copper.) Luhrman laid off most of his employees and implemented his corporate Plan B: buying half-dollars from banks and melting the silver ones (denominations greater than five cents aren’t covered by the Mint’s rule); mining Canadian five-cent coins (which were a hundred per cent nickel most years from 1946 to 1981); and lobbying Congress.
Luhrman’s experience highlights a growing conundrum for the Mint and for U.S. taxpayers. Primarily because zinc, too, has soared in value, producing a penny now costs about 1.7 cents. Since the Mint currently manufactures more than seven billion pennies a year and “sells” them to the Federal Reserve at their face value, the Treasury incurs an annual penny deficit of about fifty million dollars—a condition known in the coin world as “negative seigniorage.” The fact that the Mint loses money on penny production annoys some people, because one-cent coins no longer have much economic utility. More than a few people, upon finding pennies in their pockets at the end of the day, simply throw them away, and many don’t bother to pick them up anymore when they see them lying on the ground. (Breaking stride to pick up a penny, if it takes more than 6.15 seconds, pays less than the federal minimum wage.)

I tend to refuse pennies. They are literally not worth the hassle of using. It’s absurd that a coin worth less than its face value would have to be protected by federal law. Obama threw his weight behind ditching it earlier today, so perhaps we can eliminate this useless and wasteful part of American currency soon.

From CBS news:

“Every five or six hours they came and pulled me back down. And the doctor came to watch if I can still survive to not. He looked into my eyes. He checked my heart. And when he said okay, then they pulled me back up,” Kurnaz says.

“The point of the doctor’s visit was not to treat you. It was to see if you could take another six hours hanging from the ceiling?” Pelley asks.

“Right,” Kurnaz says.

“I suspect you know that the U.S. military will deny this happened. The U.S. military will deny that you were shocked. It will deny your head was held in a bucket of water. It will deny that you hung from a ceiling for days at a time,” Pelley remarks.

“Doesn’t matter whatever they will say. The truth will not change,” Kurnaz says.

“And you’re telling me in this interview that this is the truth?” Pelley asks.

“This is the truth,” Kurnaz insists.

Kurnaz isn’t alone in these allegations: other freed prisoners have described electric shocks at Kandahar, and even U.S. troops have admitted beating prisoners who were hanging by their arms. Kurnaz’s story fits a pattern.
…

Six months after Kurnaz reached Guantanamo, U.S. military intelligence had written, “criminal investigation task force has no definite link [or] evidence of detainee having an association with al Qaeda or making any specific threat toward the U.S.”

…

“Have you ever in your legal career run across anything like this?” Pelley asks Baher Azmy.

“In my legal career, no,” Azmy says. “But in Guantanamo, no detainee has ever been able to genuinely present evidence before a neutral judge. And so as absurd as Murat Kurnaz’s case is, I assure you there are many, many dozens just as tenuous.”

And a U.S. federal judge agreed. She ruled the Guantanamo military tribunals violated the prisoners’ right to a defense, and she singled out Kurnaz’s case as an example.

60 Minutes asked the Department of Defense to talk to us about Kurnaz. Instead they sent 60 Minutes a statement, calling his allegations “unsubstantiated” and “outlandish,” adding that claims that the U.S. military “engaged in regular and systematic torture of detainees cannot withstand even the slightest scrutiny.” The statement didn’t address why Kurnaz was held to begin with. (Click here to read the full Department of Defense statement.)

We have zero convictions for ‘enemy combatants’ at Guantanamo, which begs the question of whether this is the exception or the norm.

From Time:

It hasn’t exactly panned out like that. Thursday’s opening was a disaster. British Airways, the sole carrier operating from the terminal, canceled 34 flights, owing to computer glitches, human error and, according to airport officials, “initial teething problems.” There were also staff shortages: some employees struggled to get through security checkpoints, while others couldn’t find the employee parking lot. Only one of the terminal’s eighteen elevators was functioning, and at least one handicapped passenger was left stranded curbside — for an hour.

Terminal 5, which took two decades of planning and construction, boasts 11 miles of baggage conveyors as part of a state-of-the-art system designed to handle up to 12,000 bags an hour. And yet seven flights left on Thursday without luggage. By the early evening the airline had suspended check-in luggage because the terminal’s conveyor belt was clogged, and arriving passengers waited up to four hours to reclaim their luggage. Angry scenes reportedly erupted in passport control and baggage claim areas as disgruntled passengers pushed and shoved.

I had the pleasure of listening to the live BBC reports early morning while the terminal was opening, before any flight was scheduled to depart. What struck me was that even just for the small traffic load of the reporters arriving at the terminal caused a small traffic jam for parking.

The only thing worse than a failure is a slow failure you can watch unfold.