Via “Ed Hand”:http://homepage.mac.com/edahand/iblog/B1323778479/index.html, a silly idea that I had to do as soon as I heard about it, of course. Put your mp3 player/music software/whatever on shuffle and list the 10 songs that get played first. I like how it tells you about someone’s musical tastes without allowing them to cheat. Assuming they’re honest. Anyway, here’s mine:

1. Run For Your Life (The Beatles, Rubber Soul)
2. I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Every Day (The Pogues, Rum Sodomy & the Lash)
3. Dancing Nancies (Dave Matthews Band, Under the Table and Dreaming)
4. Kamera (Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot)
5. Little Wing (Sting, Nothing Like the Sun)
6. Mandinka (Sinead O’Connor, the Lion and the Cobra)
7. Till My Head Falls Off (They Might Be Giants, Factory Showroom)
8. Morphie (Moxy Fruvous, Bargainville)
9. Karma Police (Radiohead, OK Computer)
10. Mystery Hours (The New Pornographers, Mass Romantic)

Billmon of Whiskey Bar about the fact that one of the Pentagon’s numerous contractors in Iraq is Erinys International, a private military company (PMC) that’s providing security for Iraqi oil installations. Erinys employs a lot of South African security and paramilitary types, veterans of apartheid-era oppression. The company hit the news recently when the Shaheen hotel suicide bombing killed Frans Strydom and injured Deon Gouws, two of its employees. (Technically, they worked for SAS International, a subcontractor to Erinys Iraq, a subsidiary of Erinys Intl. So it goes.) Gouws was a police sergeant who “worked closely with the Security Branch and the notorious Vlakplaas death squad.” Strydom was a member of the Koevoet, a brutal paramilitary force that was disbanded in 1988 under pressure from the U.S.

Billmon vents a lot of righteous fury, if not surprise, at the fact that the U.S. would even consider working with a company that has those sorts of people on its payroll. (As if that’s not enough, the deal with Erinys is one of many that’s channeling money into Ahmed Chalabi’s pockets.) The rotten taste I got in my mouth reading about it all came with a bit of deja vu — another PMC with South African ties, Northbridge Services (formerly Executive Outcomes), has recently been nosing into West African politics.

I’m trying to decide if Billmon is taking it too far with this sort of comparison, though:

I suppose most ex-Gestapo hands are too old and feeble to sign up for a tour of duty in a place like Iraq. But maybe the Coalition could recruit some replacements from the ranks of the old East German Stasi?

He cites a litany of Gouws’ past crimes, but neglects to mention that they’re all known because he confessed to them in 1996 as part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It seems to me an important detail that he’s not an escaped war criminal or someone who evaded a trial, but someone who participated in the process that South African society thought best to get it beyond its years of nightmare. I don’t bring this up in order to defend Gouws, or because I think contracting with Erinys is anything but an awful idea. But I do think we need to keep our focus broader than on just the cataclysmically, obviously bad contracts. There’s a bigger issue here. The whole notion of subcontracting military operations — something that’s being taken to unprecedented levels in Iraq — carries with it problems regardless of whether the working stiffs are former Koevoet goons or former Navy SEALs.

These articles (and this one:)[1] examine the extent of corporate involvement in the Iraq war and previous engagements. When it comes to private contracting there’s a whole spectrum from food service workers and the like to the folks who take on actual soldierly duties — those are the ones I’m concerned with here. It’s impossible to know how many such people there are in Iraq, because the companies that employ them are under no obligation to reveal their numbers to the public. The same goes for their casualty figures, which aren’t included in the official U.S. military tallies.

It should come as no surprise that the increased use of private contractors in a military operation is part and parcel of Donald Rumsfeld’s vision of a leaner, meaner military. He would like to farm out as many duties as possible and use soldiers for battlefield gunnery and little else. Erinys is guarding the oil fields. Dyncorp is training the Iraqi police force. As James Fallows observed, it was for tasks like this that the Future of Iraq project recommended a much bigger military presence in Iraq. Rumsfeld slashed the troop strength and brought in the private sector instead.

So why is this such a bad idea? First of all, as noted above, private contractors aren’t accountable to the public the way that the government is. They aren’t even accountable to Congress: the Executive branch can hire contractors without having to seek Congressional approval, and can use this tactic to avoid Congressional limits on military activity. (For example, PMCs are fighting a proxy war in Colombia in order to keep the apparent extent of U.S. involvement to a minimum.) Then there’s the bit about our tax dollars paying for the livelihood of apartheid-era thugs. Or the time in Bosnia when Dyncorp employees kept underaged women as sex slaves. It all comes back to accountability — imagine for a second how much more of a brouhaha there’d have been if those guys had been U.S. soldiers and not private contractors. American soldiers take an oath of service, operate behind U.S. diplomacy, and are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. None of this holds true for a private contractor, even though odds are that he was a general or a member of Special Forces just a few years ago, and made the jump to the private sector for a cushier, better-paying job.

Today, PMCs are beholden to the government for their contracts — it’s how they make all their money. But they’ll grow and diversify. What happens when one of them gets big enough to bully Congress around? When international conflicts help their bottom line, what’s to stop them from encouraging a military action that would otherwise be ill-advised, even unconscionable? Some people would say that’s already happened; some would even say it’s happened twice. I’m not that cynical yet, but there’s little question that’s the way the trend is going. Give me a big, expensive, risk-averse military beauracracy — heck, even a UN peacekeeping force! — any day over an outfit whose first priority isn’t peace and stability, but enhancing shareholder value. The privatization of war is just a subset of the larger problem of privatization: there are some situations where you want the profit motive to stay the hell away.

[1] The articles cited here and below appeared in various publications originally, but are currently hosted by CorpWatch, the Global Policy Forum, and Sandline International. Sandline is actually a PMC, and its site mirrors not just the text of articles but all the html and images on the pages where they originally occur. I don’t know what’s weirder — that, or the fact that they happily link to articles highly critical to PMCs right from their website.

Take “this dialect quiz”:http://www.chuckchamblee.com/dom/fun/yankee_dixie_quiz.htm to determine if you’re a Yankee or a Dixie. Hat tip to “David Austin-Groen”:http://www.austin-groen.com/.

I came up with a 63% Dixie score, which I find strange since it pegged a number of my pronunciations and terms as Great Lakes/Midwestern variations. I know a decade south of the Mason/Dixon will do things to a man, but _sixty-three_? You’d think all that West Michigan blood, or the New Jersey twang of my birth, or even the Liberian English would hold up against the ol’ Southern drawl. What gives?

“Y’all” must count for thirty points or something. It’s the only explanation.

* This one’s a bit dated now, but Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s “Slushkiller”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html#004641 is a fantastic piece on rejection letters from an editor’s perspective.
* Dadgummit — I had something written about James’ Fallows excellent article “Blind Into Baghdad”:http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/01/fallows.htm, but either it’s been accidentally overwritten or I only dreamt that I wrote something about it. Anyway, the article is an analysis of the way the Office of the Secretary of Defense willfully ignored careful planning and recommendations concerning post-invasion Iraq, with (now obviously) tragic consequences. Hat tip to “Amygdala”:http://amygdalagf.blogspot.com/.
* Jonathan Edelstein’s essay “Journeyman Conspirators”:http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/archives/021187.html looks at the origins of organized labor in England. Hmmm. Now that I’ve written that I realize that it may sound very boring, but trust me, it’s not.
* The ex-TV show Firefly now has “its own wiki”:http://www.fireflywiki.org/. It’s only just begun, but hopefully it will flesh out — I found other online resources for this sort of nerdy Firefly lore disappointing. There’s some interesting notes toward using “Unknown Armies”:http://www.atlas-games.com/ua_index.html for Firefly-themed roleplaying. I haven’t played UA, and while it has a stellar reputation, my kneejerk reaction is to be suspicous about porting a game about “modern occult intrigue” to a setting that paradoxically melds the Western with gritty sci-fi . But given the overwhelming unlikelihood that a “real” Firefly RPG will ever 1) be developed and 2) be up to snuff, I guess there’s little cause to be picky. (Hat tip to “Ed Hand”:http://homepage.mac.com/edahand/iblog/B1323778479/index.html)
* Reader “Bill Katz”:http://www.billkatz.com/ sent me a link to a “Best Photos 2003”:http://www.fifth-essence.com/archive/bestpix2003/index.htm web page. I have no idea who decided they were best, but some of them are pretty cool.
* UPDATE: From later last night, here’s Jim Henley “defending the importance of superhero stories”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2004_02_22.html#005089, and bringing in some useful distinctions between fantasy and sci-fi to boot.

On the Diane Rehm Show[1] the other day, the commentators were taking great pleasure in talking about the Kerry infidelity non-scandal, now that it’s over. It was yet another one of those media navel-gazing conversations, nothing special. One of the commentators trotted out a statistic that I’d heard several places before: “Matt Drudge’s site gets fifteen _million_ hits a day.”

It struck me that when traditional media types cite a number like that, they probably don’t have a good handle on what it means. Absent any further explanation, we’re left with the impression that Drudge’s site attracts fifteen million _readers_ a day. And — as all you fellow bloggers and other webstats addicts already know — that is far, far from the truth.

Polytropos has averaged 3400 hits per day so far this month. What I’m really interested in is how many _readers_ are stopping by, but that number is much smaller and harder to come by. For starters, I know that a whopping 35% of my traffic comes from search engines, thanks in large part to a “bizarre twist of Google fate”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000266.html. I assume that the vast majority of these people didn’t find what they were looking for, and don’t stay long. “Hits” include every single little poke onto the site, including every time somebody’s news aggregator pops in for a split second to see if anything’s new. So if, say, my buddy “Ed”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org/ has his set to check for new content every hour, then on any given day he accounts for at least 24 hits — more if he happens to stop by to actually read something. And for every person like Ed who accounts for ~30 hits and actually reads new material, there’s no doubt several more who only read things once in a while, if the titles or excerpts look intriguing. Long story short: if I’m really lucky then maybe 10% of those hits represent people actually coming by and doing some thoughtful reading. 5% is probably more realistic.

Now, even if Drudge gets 1.5 million thoughtful readers a day, that’s pretty darn impressive, but not on the same scale as 15 million. (One could easily debate the accuracy of calling Drudge’s readers “thoughtful,” but I won’t get into that right now.) My only point is that while “hits” are a useful way to compare and gauge site traffic, the raw stats don’t tell you a whole lot about actual visitors, and aren’t at all comparable to, say, the number of subscribers for a newspaper or magazine. Though it sure would be cool if they were!

fn1. I can’t stand Diane Rehm, but she gets good guests sometimes, and when you’re home alone all day with a baby, NPR is indispensable.

Greg Costikyan has “announced”:http://www.costik.com/weblog/2004_02_01_blogchive.html#107719898782841523 the return of the classic roleplaying game Paranoia for the new millenium. I’m happy to note that Paranoia XP has “its own blog”:http://www.costik.com/paranoia/, where the developers plan to offer updates and steal ideas from readers. It’s only just begun, so the talk thus far is about “the philosophy of the game”:http://www.costik.com/paranoia/2004_02_01_blogchive.html#107719871081058833 and not so much about system. I do have some worries about system, only because Paranoia XP will be published by “Mongoose Publishing”:http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/. Those guys make stylish stuff, but they’re a D20 publisher, and their Babylon 5 RPG exemplifies for me the “problems with using D20 as a universal system”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000048.html. If there’s a game and a setting that _demands_ its own system instead of a cookie-cutter framework, it’s Paranoia. But there’s zero indication so far that PXP is going to be a D20 game, so I’m probably working myself up over nothing. Besides, I’m happy. Very very happy. Happiness is mandatory.

UPDATE: You know, if I had just read the whole dang press release carefully, I’d have noticed this bit in the Q&A:

Player: Are you using the d20 rules system?

The Computer: No. PARANOIA is fun. D20 games are not fun. The Computer says so.

So there ya go.

Howard Dean just officially announced the end of his presidential campaign. It aired on CSPAN2; the networks kept showing their soap operas. Though he didn’t get into the details, he said that Dean for America would continue on as a grassroots organization dedicated to the principles of his campaign. (It might have been nice for something more concrete about those principles, instead of the usual talk about ordinary people, some bitterness toward the “Democratic establishment,” and a mixed metaphor concerning “change.”) He didn’t endorse another candidate, and he encouraged his supporters to vote Democratic in the election: “The bottom line is we must beat George Bush, whatever it takes.”

All these things speak very highly of Dr. Dean. Heading up a scrappy grassroots movement after having once been the favored presidential candidate is the act of a man of principle, not an egomaniac. I was a little worried after some of his recent comments that he’d come out for Edwards, which, after all his bashing of “Washington insiders,” would make him come off as little more than a sore loser. Ironically, his bottom line — “we must beat George Bush” — is the very reason that many people ended up not voting for him. In one sense that’s nonsense, because Dean _could_ have beat Bush, but _something_ happened in his campaign to evaporate all that money and support and result in such a disappointing finish in Iowa. As a fellow proponent of the “beat Bush” philosophy, I do feel a bit safer with Kerry.

Of course, the race isn’t over yet. And dang, can Edwards give a speech. Especially with all those Dean voters as new wildcards, he definitely has a medium-to-long shot. I still think (as I “did before”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000259.html) that a longer primary race ultimately benefits the Democrats, as long as they don’t get too vicious with each other — which Kerry and Edwards haven’t been doing. For that reason I find myself pleased by Edwards’ strong second place finish in Wisconsin, and I hope he picks up a few actual wins to keep things interesting. Kerry edges ahead in my personal estimation because his positions are closer to mine in the one issue the two of them disagree on (free trade), and because (unlike Dean) I see his long experience inside the Beltway as an advantage, not a curse.

Then again, there’s a strong argument to be made that Edwards is a bit more electable than Kerry. So what to do? Since my primary’s come and gone, it’s a question I can safely leave unanswered for now. In any case, things between the two of them are going to be a bit more complicated than they were in “my dream”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000262.html.

It’s Valentine’s Day weekend, and love is in the air. That’s why the Pentagon City mall was so packed yesterday afternoon. No, wait — that’s because it’s President’s Day weekend and there’s all sorts of “sales.” At any rate those are the grounds on which Suanna suggested we visit the mall to get some stuff we’ve been needing for a while.

I kind of cherished the idea of strolling around with Ella strapped to my chest in the Baby Bjorn, so I went along with the whole shopping idea. Had I stopped to think I would have realized that going to Pentagon City on _any_ weekend afternoon is a damn fool idea, let alone a holiday weekend, but that didn’t occur to me until we were already there and confronting the long line of cars waiting to get into the parking garage.

First stop: the Wizards of the Coast store, where I hoped to be able to kill some time while Suanna got her hair cut. Turns out the place was going out of business, and everything was on sale. But “everything” consisted, by and large, of “piles and piles of crap.” WOTC was a decent enough hobby store when it first opened, but somewhere along the line they decided to stop selling all non-WOTC roleplaying material, scaled back their stock of German-style boardgames, dropped computer games altogether, and filled their shelves with bland party games, crappy chess and backgammon boards, and all umpteen-million versions of the game Cranium. During the holidays their business strategy was buy as much of this stuff as would fit into the store and then cross their fingers and hope people would buy it. This didn’t happen, which may explain why they’re going out of business — or maybe all WOTC stores are, I don’t know.

Anyway, before she left for her haircut Suanna did find a birthday present for our nephew, so it fell to me (and Ella) to wait in line. The line snaked through the crowded store, and moved at a snail’s pace because the guys at the registers weren’t the usual employees, but dudes from corporate who were just here to oversee the liquidation process. One of them was clearly annoyed that he was having to work the register at all, and expressed his annoyance by not looking at the customers and by taking his sweet time ringing their stuff up. While I was waiting in line Ella woke up and realized that weren’t _moving_, that there wasn’t enough to _see_, and started telling me so in a loud, clear voice.

Twenty minutes or so later, I had finally escaped that godforsaken place, and was weaving my way through the mall toward the Macy’s to look at rice cookers. Ella was content as long as we were moving, but given the crowds, and the fact that any given escalator had a 30% chance of being broken at any given moment, there was plenty of standing around. Thankfully she decided that the better course of action was just to shut all the noise out and fall asleep. I wish I could have done the same.

Eager to be quit of this place, I took it upon myself to get the rice cooker at Macy’s without waiting for Suanna, figuring I’d run into her while she was heading there from the haircut place to meet me. But of course we didn’t cross paths, so I reached the haircut place to find her not-there, and had to head all the way back through the insufferable crowds to the Macy’s, lugging a diaper bag and a rice cooker, with Ella — by this point, the equivalent of a high-intensity space heater — strapped to my chest. When I found Suanna she reminded me about the 15% off coupon she had clipped and that I had forgotten to use at Macy’s, so we had to wait in line _again_ to try to get the additional discount, only to discover that the rice cooker we had purchased was already on sale and no additional coupons were allowed.

When Suanna suggested that we also stop at the mattress store, I suggested (as politely as I could, which at this point wasn’t very politely) that we do it some other time. That other time turned out to be this morning. Now, I’ve never had to buy a new mattress before, so I don’t know if the sort of nonsense the lady there tried to foist on us is normal. Like the fact that the boxspring costs as much as the mattress itself (?!), a fact conveniently left off the sale flyer, and that you can’t get a warranty unless you buy both the mattress _and_ the box spring. To top it off, the big sale prices turned out to be little more than chickenshit 10% discounts. Needless to say, we didn’t get a mattress.

All this shopping fun occurred before a backdrop of hearts, ribbons, and a tidal wave of pink. I was prepared to end this little rant with a bitter complaint about Valentine’s Day as the most transparent of Hallmark holidays, a nice idea blighted by crass consumerism. Historically, though, “that’s not the case”:http://www.snarkout.org/archives/2004/02/14/. Thankfully our Valentine’s Day ended in a much more convivial atmosphere, at a birthday party, surrounded by love. For the foreseeable future, though, it will take a great deal of work to convince me ever to shop for anything anywhere except online, ever again.

“Jonathan Laughlin”:http://www.jonathanlaughlin.com/ of (“Craic Wisely”:http://www.craicwisely.com/ fame) has finished counting down his favorite ten Beatles albums on his blog. Each entry contains notes, background, favorite songs — all kinds of good stuff. Here’s his list, with links to the relevant entries:

10. “Beatles For Sale”:http://www.jonathanlaughlin.com/archives/000066.html
9. “Help!”:http://www.jonathanlaughlin.com/archives/000068.html
8. “Hard Day’s Night”:http://www.jonathanlaughlin.com/archives/000067.html
7. “Let It Be”:http://www.jonathanlaughlin.com/archives/000070.html
6. “Sgt. Pepper”:http://www.jonathanlaughlin.com/archives/000072.html
5. “Magical Mystery Tour”:http://www.jonathanlaughlin.com/archives/000073.html
4. “Rubber Soul”:http://www.jonathanlaughlin.com/archives/000074.html
3. “Abbey Road”:http://www.jonathanlaughlin.com/archives/000078.html
2. “The White Album”:http://www.jonathanlaughlin.com/archives/000086.html
1. “Revolver”:http://www.jonathanlaughlin.com/archives/000094.html

I’d bump Revolver down a peg or two, Abbey Road up, Rubber Soul up, Sgt. Pepper up, and MMT down a few to make room for it all. But what do I know? Jonathan has more Beatles lore in his left eyebrow than I do in my, um, brain. Not sure what he’s planning to count down next, but let me presume to recommend Led Zeppelin, R.E.M., and live Phish shows. Me, I’m calling dibs on a They Might Be Giants countdown. One of these days.

Having ordered the DVD, I finally got to watch the pilot of “Firefly”:http://www.scifispace.com/html/firefly.php. Twice. And once more with the commentary. This is the two-part opener that Fox decided was too . . . _something_ to kick off the season, so it didn’t air until the tail end of of the show’s tragically aborted run, and I never got to see it back then. Now that I have, a couple thoughts: 1) Fox execs have peas for brains. 2) This is as close to perfect as you get to see on television.

I said recently”:http://www.polytropos.org/index.php?p=277 that being into certain shows was a labor of love, because the price for what they have — true storytelling like you rarely see on TV — is that you have to tolerate the weak spots — low production values, unpolished writing, bargain-basement guest actors, unimaginative directing. Firefly is such a show on occasion, but in the pilot (and in more than a few of the other episodes, if memory serves) you get all the meaty story goodness without any of those wince-worthy moments. Every single scene sings.

I’ll save more gushing and hopefully some more substantive thoughts, as well as an explanation of the show for those who never saw it, for a later post after I’ve re-watched everything. But a quick comment for fellow fans: the biggest reason that it irks me that Fox didn’t start at the beginning is that the pilot _actually explains what the deal is with all those planets_. Absent that first episode, it’s a little hard to sort out whether spaceships are travelling interstellar distances and, if not, how come there’s so many planets so close together. The pilot makes clear that humans have terraformed every planet, moon, and hunk of rock in the solar system that they can, and even (it’s implied) crammed more rock together to terraform that too. It’s also suggested that some planets all lay along the same “belt,” meaning (I presume) that they’re all following the same orbital path. Cool. Interesting. Dang it. I miss the show already.