Bear Stearns/LTCM

Podcast listening on your Samsung D807/T809

I was thrilled to discover Melodeo today when I was searching for info on downloading podcasts to my Samsung D807 (Cingular). I had previously used Pod2Mob, which seems to have fallen by the wayside and/or been abandoned by its creators.

The Melodeo "Mobilcast" service provides a wealth of podcasts from all over the spectrum, and even though my phone wasn't listed as a supported handset as yet, I was able to download the Java/J2ME Melodeo app to the D807 via an SMS link and listen to podcasts in a matter of minutes. I suspect it will work just as well with the D807's sister phone, the T809 on T-Mobile.

After downloading and starting the app on my phone, I generated a "sync code" on the main Melodeo website using my laptop, and I was then able to enter the code in a box on my phone and link to all the favorites I had chosen via the web interface. It worked flawlessly.

The great thing about the service is that it streams the podcasts directly to your phone in real time, which eliminates the need to download and save huge MP3 files to the phone's memory. Of course, this means the service could be subject to network congestion and the like now and then, and it means you won't be able to listen if you're on a small, uncharted island somewhere - but for those times, one can still go the other route and save the files on the phone's microSD card via the podcast provider's website.

Mobilcast is a great service, and it's free thusfar. It's still in beta, so one can only wonder what the plan is vis-a-vis revenue generation in the future. For now at least, it's great to have access to all the news and such that I've been missing.

UPDATE 8/9/2006: Having experimented with it further, I'm still happy with the service, but I've noticed one quirk with the D807 phone (which is admittedly an unsupported model thusfar, as noted above). The volume on some podcasts leaves a lot to be desired when using the phone's built-in speaker, and there doesn't seem to be a way to increase it beyond the too-low level in those cases. Of course, volume isn't an issue when I use the cheap T809 headset I acquired via eBay, but once in awhile it would be nice to listen to those podcasts without the use of headphones. Some of this problem may be due to the D807's well-known, low-volume issue with its speaker (people are actively searching for a hack to improve things), but it would also be great if the Mobilcast software had a better volume interface with the phone. Overall, though, I'm still very happy to have streaming access to all of the podcasts on my phone.

Israel destroys two Red Cross ambulances

From the Guardian:

The ambulance headlamps were on, the blue light overhead was flashing, and another light illuminated the Red Cross flag when the first Israeli missile hit, shearing off the right leg of the man on the stretcher inside. As he lay screaming beneath fire and smoke, patients and ambulance workers scrambled for safety, crawling over glass in the dark. Then another missile hit the second ambulance.

Even in a war which has turned the roads of south Lebanon into killing zones, Israel's rocket strike on two clearly marked Red Cross ambulances on Sunday night set a deadly new milestone.

Children and the cost of war

Standing in front of this 8-year-old boy lying in a hospital bed, the "conflict in the Middle East" and the "cost of war" seem endless and suffocating. His pain cannot possibly be imagined as he shakes uncontrollably in and out of shock. He has blood coming from his eyes.

His name is Mahmood Monsoor and he is horribly burned. In the hospital bed next to him is his 8-month-old sister, Maria -- also burned. Screaming at the top of her lungs is the children's mother, Nuhader Monsoor. She is standing over her baby, looking at her son -- and probably thinking of her dead husband. The smell of burned flesh is overwhelming.

This story, for the Monsoor family, started out as a typical one, probably one that most of us have experienced. They had simply gone on a family vacation to some lovely sunny beaches, but these beaches were in southern Lebanon.

The six of them, like thousands of others, were fleeing the fighting -- trying to get north, waving white flags, when an Israeli bomb or missile slammed into their car.

More from CNN's Cal Perry here.

John Negroponte cited as roadblock to accurate assessment of Iraq

John Negroponte, arguably an honorary member of the "American al Qaeda" for his role in helping to facilitate and then cover up the torture and killing of hundreds of innocents in Nicaragua and environs during the 1980s, has recently been cited as having stood in the way when a new assessment of the state of affairs in Iraq was proposed.

It's thought that an accurate look at things as they stand in Iraq would paint a dire picture that might cause headaches for the Bush administration and some on Capitol Hill, and Negroponte, in his role as Director of National Intelligence, is thought to have stepped in to block efforts to do so.

Meanwhile, many employees of the C.I.A. and other agencies are privately advocating for an honest and overdue look at the state of things in conflict-torn Iraq, a situation that has highlighted the deepening chasm between rank-and-file agents and analysts and Negroponte, a political appointee with a considerable accumulation of dirty laundry in his past that many feel sullies the intelligence community he ostensibly oversees.

It's thought that Negroponte and his allies will ultimately lose out, as many are working from within and without the various agencies to make public what is known about the ongoing strife in Iraq, not least the evidence that the U.S. incursion has fomented a bona-fide civil war that shows every sign of increasing in intensity. Whether such efforts will result in the formal issue of a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) document is open to speculation.

Moreover, additional evidence may be emerging that will serve to undermine Negroponte's credibility as an advocate for the interests of the U.S. populace, the Iraqi populace or any populace, save the small, disgraced subset of humanity who traffic in human misery and depredation - the McVeighs, the Pinochets, the bin Ladens of this world - and this may be the final straw for him as a viable participant on the world stage.

Bush administration signs off on killing of Lebanese civilians

With little internal debate, the Bush administration has approved the expedited shipment of laser-guided bombs to Israel, which is in the midst of an escalating conflict with Hezbollah forces in Lebanon. The Israeli military's deliberate targeting of civilians who have no role in the conflict, scores of whom have been killed and maimed since hostilities began, appears to have left Washington unfazed.

Israel government forces murder civilians in minivan

A family of civilians fleeing the fighting in Lebanon was targeted by Israel's military today in an act of wanton violence that left a 12-year-old boy to watch his mother die before his eyes.

The Bush legacy: nearly 6,000 Iraqi civilians died in May and June

From the CBC:

An average of nearly 100 Iraqi civilians were killed every day in May and June, a UN report released Tuesday says.

The toll in the two months was 5,818 deaths, the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq reported.

The report shows civilian deaths have risen steadily this year, from 710 in January to 1,129 in April to 2,669 in May and 3,149 in June. It calculated that 14,338 people had been killed in the first half of the year.

More here.

Smile

(Seemingly available here, in various configurations.)

Samsung SGH-P200 phone out in Italy - US version soon?

Engadget is reporting the release of this UMA (WiFi, etc. - definition) slider cell phone in Italy this week, with the potential for the P200's sister, the T709, to be released on T-Mobile sometime soon in the US.

David Letterman’s Top 10 Moments of George W Bush

Video here, via Crooks and Liars.

James Wolcott on George Bush's Roving Hands

Perhaps it was nothing more than Bush's usual privileged-snot appropriation at play. A symptom of the same syndrome that has him hanging nicknames on people, and kissing bald men on the head. Reports in the Financial Times and elsewhere have indicated that Bush is hoping/planning to groom [Angela] Merkel as the US's number one ally to fill the spot of the fading Tony Blair, to whose troubles Putin wickedly alluded. It's difficult to know what would be in it for Merkel or Germany, given the lopsidedness of the special relationship between Bush and Blair, where Blair stands stalwart on the War on Terror and for his orotund loyalty receives the contempt of his own people, cries of "poodle" in the press, and the back of Bush's hand over global warming, trade, etc. But Bush has always been a taker, not a giver. He wasn't giving Merkel a massage, he was taking possession of her, letting everybody know, "This little lady's mine." I wonder what Merkel's husband thought of Bush's handy familiarity. I can't imagine Laura Bush was too thrilled.

More from Wolcott's blog here.

Pumped Up on Carbon Dioxide, Vines Strengthen Their Grip

Vines -- poison ivy, Japanese honeysuckle, kudzu -- snake through the back yard, girdling trees and strangling shrubs, thriving, scientists say, on the same pollution they blame for global warming.

From backyard gardens to the Amazon rain forest, vines are growing faster, stronger and, in the case of poison ivy, more poisonous on the heavy doses of carbon dioxide that come from burning such fossil fuels as gasoline and coal."

(From the Washington Post. More here.)

White House links to imprisoned Bush campaign official's scheme?

James Tobin, a high-level official in the effort get George Bush re-elected in 2002, was sentenced to 10 months in prison this week and fined $10,000 for engaging in a vote supression scheme in New Hampshire.

The scheme involved jamming get-out-the-vote lines set up by a firefighter's association and the Democratic Party, which may have influenced the turnout in a number of very close elections, most of which were ultimately won by Republicans.

Subsequently, 22 telephone calls were made by Tobin and New Hampshire Republican Party officials to the White House in the days immediately following the elections. While this is obviously not proof of White House involvement in the scheme, the flurry of calls is seen by some as highly suspect.

From the article:

The former executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party, Chuck McGee, was also convicted after testifying that he had come up with the idea for the scheme.

Allen Raymond, former president of a Republican consulting firm in Virginia, was jailed after admitting to arranging for telemarketing company to make the calls.

"We need to find out how high this goes in the Republican Party," said Paul Twomey, an attorney for the Democratic Party who is leading a separate civil lawsuit that alleges Republican voter fraud and seeks monetary damages.

Great Billie Holiday footage from 1957 TV

Billie Holiday sings "Fine and Mellow" (YouTube link), with Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Gerry Mulligan, Roy Eldridge, Doc Cheatham, Vic Dickenson, Danny Barker, Milt Hinton, and Mal Waldron accompanying her on a 1957 airing of the CBS TV program, "The Sound of Jazz".

18 super-wealthy families secretly lead effort to repeal estate tax

From Sam Smith's Undernews:

The multimillion-dollar lobbying effort to repeal the federal estate tax has been aggressively led by 18 super-wealthy families, according to a report by Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy. The report reveals how 18 families worth a total of $185.5 billion have financed and coordinated a 10-year effort to repeal the estate tax, a move that would collectively net them a windfall of $71.6 billion.

(...)

In a massive public relations campaign, the families have also misled the country by giving the mistaken impression that the estate tax affects most Americans. In particular, they have used small businesses and family farms as poster children for repeal, saying that the estate tax destroys both of these groups. But just more than one-fourth of one percent of all estates will owe any estate taxes in 2006. And the American Farm Bureau, a member of the anti-estate tax coalition, was unable when asked by The New York Times to cite a single example of a family being forced to sell its farm because of estate tax liability.

Kevin Ray Underwood blogged about depression, social anxiety

It appears the 26-year-old man who murdered Jamie Rose Bolin, the 10-year-old girl from Purcell Oklahoma who lived in the apartment upstairs with her dad, had blogged at length about an almost crippling social anxiety problem and an ongoing struggle with depression.

In particular, posts here and here discuss his troubles, though he also goes on from month to month about his small-town supermarket job, his musical interests (They Might Be Giants, Fat Boy Slim, Chumbawamba, Pink Floyd, Daft Punk, Rob Zombie, Weird Al Yankovic...), and innumerable other topics that captured his attention. He clearly had a healthy interest in many things, and his wide-ranging intellect marked him as someone who might have been successful at something if he'd been given the help that he needed.

Unfortunately, Kevin seems like a poster child for the fucked-up health care delivery system in the U.S. In all likelihood, what he needed was some intervention on the part of someone who understood his particular circumstances (and maybe a few adjustments vis-a-vis his medications). Reading his blog, it's striking how the psychological issues he's been dealing with are, for the most part, fairly straightforward and would likely be manageable with the right treatment. And in almost every other respect, he comes off as a relatively normal, capable individual.

Was he a "cannibal"? No. Certainly, in his extremely desperate, compromised state, he committed actions that suggest he was about to commit a cannibalistic act. But that doesn't make him a cannibal any more than George Bush's having piloted a plane a few times and worn a flight suit on the deck of a carrier makes him a flying ace.

Had Kevin been given the help he needed, the acts he committed might have been - in all probability, would have been - avoided, but the system failed to deliver. Now it's too late for him, and especially, too late for his young, unfortunate victim.

Y.E.L.R.A (Your Ever-Lovin' Restroom Attendant) takes his leave

Alas, we'll miss the anecdotes. For those who haven't encountered said restroom attendant's blog, here's a snippet from his introductory post, written in August of 2005:

Where am I going with this? What I'm trying to say is that I have a lot of stories about what goes on in a unisex restroom. Some will surprise you, others will make you shake your head in disbelief over the way people act towards each other. In all honesty, I have some stories ready to share. Others have not happened yet.

It's going to be interesting...

You can check out the blog (assuming he leaves it up) here.

Speaking of the minimum wage...

In the context of an article in the New York Times on the "mobile homeless" (people forced to live in their cars), the writer highlights the following factoid:

Last year was the first year on record, according to an annual study conducted by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, that a full-time worker at minimum wage could not afford a one-bedroom apartment anywhere in the country at average market rates.

Not anywhere. Wow.

Big changes at 666 Broadway, 11th Floor

The new editor of Harper's Magazine rides a skateboard.

I know - "BFD," you'll say. What's more, you'll have to read through the whole piece to find the tidbit. Ah, well.

(BTW, the mag really does reside at 666 Broadway, along with a handful of other nonprofit entities.)

86% of Americans want an increase in the minimum wage

This level of support is uniform across the entire political spectrum, with the exception of that small subset of the citizenry that the Pew Research Center defines as "Enterprisers" - staunch right-wingers with a professed zeal for the free enterprise system, patriotism (including the war in Iraq and the Patriot Act), monied, pro-corporate, anti-welfare, minimal environmental regulation... you get the picture.

Graphs of the different levels of support here.

Iraq war hoopla, revisited

The good people at FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) have compiled a jaw-dropping collection of quotes from 2003 and thereabouts, in which various members of the press gush about the "success" and the ostensibly hasty denouement of the war in Iraq. It's about time they're reminded of their foolishness and slavish disregard for their proper role as skeptical inquirers! In retrospect, some of the statements are just breathtakingly stupid. (Actually, most were just as stupid at the time.)

Forward the link to all those you know who may have conveniently overlooked what a sorry state the mainstream media is in, Helen Thomas notwithstanding.

"The Road to Guantanamo" gets U.S. release

"The Road to Guantanamo," which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and won the Silver Bear prize for best director, has been picked up by distributors Roadside Attraction in the U.S., and will be opening here early this summer after a spring showing at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.

The hybrid docu/dramatization tells the story of three British men who traveled to Pakistan to plan a wedding, were picked up as terrorist suspects, and were spirited away to the prison at Guantanamo for a two-year incarceration that ended in their release with no charges brought against them.

And in a case of "life imitates art imitates life," the actors who played the three British prisoners were detained and questioned by police at the airport on their return from the Berlin Film Festival before being released without arrest.

Czech Republic passes landmark gay rights law

The Czech parliament has passed a law giving gay couples the right to inherit a partner's property and raise (but not adopt) children, making the Czech Republic the first formerly-communist country to do so.

Previously, Czech President Vaclav Kraus had vetoed the measure, but it's now been passed with a majority that's sufficient to override a new veto.

In defense of his earlier veto, the President had stated that the law amounted to "excessive regulation of people's private lives". That's funny - I would have thought it amounted to a freeing-up of people's private lives, but maybe that's just me.

Arab banks switching reserves from dollars to euros

From the UK's Independent:

Middle Eastern anger over the decision by the US to block a Dubai company from buying five of its ports hit the dollar yesterday as a number of central banks said they were considering switching reserves into euros.

The United Arab Emirates, which includes Dubai, said it was looking to move one-tenth of its dollar reserves into euros, while the governor of the Saudi Arabian central bank condemned the US move as "discrimination".

Separately, Syria responded to US sanctions against two of its banks by confirming plans to use euros instead of dollars for its external transactions.

The remarks combined to knock the dollar, which fell against the euro, pound and yen yesterday as analysts warned other central banks might follow suit.

Just one small step, but who's to say how far it might someday reach? And if oil is increasingly denominated in euros, watch out...

Reacting to the Dubai ports issue, the governor of the Saudi Arabian monetary authority was quoted in the article as saying,

"Is it protection or discrimination? Is it okay for US companies to buy everywhere but it is not okay for other companies to buy the US?"

He has an excellent point. And never mind that the workers at the U.S. ports, regardless of the company they work for, would largely remain Americans. There wouldn't be waves of turbaned dockworkers descending on the ports, dropping out of the sky like the legions of monkeys from Oz. We're talking about ownership here, not employees. There's a big difference!

It's really much ado about nothing, though the repercussions could be anything but nothing if actions like the above by the banks multiply.

Stupid Republicans, stupid opportunistic Democrats. Fuck them all. Then again, as I've said before, the dollar deserves to get knocked off its pedestal as the world's "premier" currency, so maybe it's for the best!

Significant rise in CO2 levels seen

From the BBC:

BBC News has learned the latest data shows CO2 levels now stand at 381 parts per million (ppm) - 100ppm above the pre-industrial average.

The research indicates that 2005 saw one of the largest increases on record - a rise of 2.6ppm. (...)

The chief carbon dioxide analyst for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) says the latest data confirms a worrying trend that recent years have, on average, recorded double the rate of increase from just 30 years ago.

"We don't see any sign of a decrease; in fact, we're seeing the opposite, the rate of increase is accelerating," Dr Pieter Tans told the BBC. (...)

"Today we're over 380 ppm," he said. "That's higher than we've been for over a million years, possibly 30 million years. Mankind is changing the climate".

Donald Rumsfeld scores big on bird flu drug

From an article in the UK Independent:

Donald Rumsfeld has made a killing out of bird flu. The US Defence Secretary has made more than $5m (£2.9m) in capital gains from selling shares in the biotechnology firm that discovered and developed Tamiflu, the drug being bought in massive amounts by Governments to treat a possible human pandemic of the disease. (...)

Mr Rumsfeld was on the board of Gilead from 1988 to 2001, and was its chairman from 1997. He then left to join the Bush administration, but retained a huge shareholding. (...)

Mr Rumsfeld sold some of his Gilead shares in 2004 reaping - according to the financial disclosure report he is required to make each year - capital gains of more than $5m. The report showed that he still had up to $25m-worth of shares at the end of 2004, and at least one analyst believes his stake has grown well beyond that figure, as the share price has soared.

Republicans - the actual "Party of Death"

Steve at the Carpetbagger Report, riffing on a post by Andrew Sullivan, highlights the right wing's opposition to a vaccine that's highly effective in preventing cervical cancer, on the grounds that they believe said vaccine will increase the likelyhood of pre-marital sex. He writes:

Let's be clear here. There is a vaccine that is literally 100% effective in preventing cervical cancer and precancerous changes tied to two types of a common sexually transmitted virus. But for the right, the vaccine may let young people believe they can have sex without getting cervical cancer, so, naturally, as far as they're concerned, the vaccine must not be available.

A vaccine could prevent more than 200,000 women from dying of cervical cancer each year (including 5,000 women in the United States). As New Scientist recently reported, deaths from cervical cancer could jump fourfold to a million a year by 2050, mainly in developing countries, all of which are preventable with this vaccine.

The far-right GOP base doesn't seem to care. It comes down to a fairly straightforward position: The vaccine may lead to more pre-marital sex, so let those hundreds of thousands of women die a painful death.

Ah, yes - giving the Taliban a run for their money, right here in the U.S. of A. Never let it be said that "it can't happen here."

Condi's coca leaf charango

Bolivia's new leader, Evo Morales, presented this coca leaf-inlaid guitar (a traditional Andean charango) to Condoleezza Rice when they met for the first time before the inauguration of Chile's newly-elected female president, Michelle Bachelet.

Affordable rental housing disappearing

A new Harvard University study highlights the dwindling supply of affordable rental housing throughout the U.S. Of course, this doesn't come as a shock to those of us familiar with the condoification of big cities and the creeping "ownership paradigm" that all but shuts renters out of the calculus on housing...

The study finds nearly 200,000 rental units being lost annually nationwide, despite a sizeable projected increase in demand over the next ten years, largely as a result of immigration.

What's more, while the median rent for 2004 was up 33 percent from ten years earlier, the median renter's income had only risen 3 percent.

Ambien users become somnambulists

The New York Times reports that an increasing number of cases are turning up around the country involving users of Ambien, the prescription sleeping drug, involved in bizarre sleepwalking or sleep-driving episodes:

Ambien, the nation's best-selling prescription sleeping pill, is showing up with regularity as a factor in traffic arrests, sometimes involving drivers who later say they were sleep-driving and have no memory of taking the wheel after taking the drug. (...)

Doctors affiliated with the University of Minnesota Medical Center who have studied Ambien recently reported the cases of two users who told doctors they sleep-drove to the supermarket while under the drug's influence. Neither of the patients remembered the episode the next day, according to Dr. Carlos Schenck, an expert in sleep disorders who is the lead researcher in the study. (...)

The traffic cases around the country include that of Dwayne Cribb, a longtime probation and parole officer in Rock Hill, S.C. Mr. Cribb says he remembers nothing after taking Ambien before bed last Halloween — until he awoke in jail to learn he had left his bed and gone for a drive, smashed into a parked van and driven away before crashing into a tree. Mr. Cribb is still facing charges of leaving the scene of an accident.

A registered nurse who lives outside Denver took Ambien before going to sleep one night in January 2003. Sometime later — she says she remembers none of the episode — she got into her car wearing only a thin nightshirt in 20-degree weather, had a fender bender, urinated in the middle of an intersection, then became violent with police officers, according to her lawyer.

James Wolcott on Hollywood and "middle America"

Is Hollywood "out of step"? Vanity Fair columnist/editor James Wolcott's take, as with a few others - George Clooney among them, interviewed just prior to the Oscars - is that Hollywood always has been, and we should count our lucky stars.

(The rest of Wolcott's blog is well worth a general peruse as well...)

Survey: Africans "most optimistic"

Further to the previous post which touches on the fact that, as continents go, Africa is as ravaged as they come, the New York Times has a story regarding a recent Gallup survey of 50,000 people that found Africans to be the most optimistic on the planet.

My first reaction was that it made some sense - when you're so far down, gazing upward at the little patch of blue at the top of the well might come naturally. But then I realized how easy it is to just give up when everything's pressing down, or at least wallow in misery as one slogs on from day to day, as so many people are wont to do.

The article posits that religion may have a significant role in shaping attitudes there, which does make sense. As anyone who's jettisoned religious belief in favor of a more scientific or "rational" world view will tell you (count me in), losing one's religion has a peculiar bottom-falling-out aspect that's both liberating and a bit daunting. Yes, you're on your own, after all - no cushion, no "reason", no guide except your nose.

But if anyone's in dire need of an undergirding of optimism at present, it's the populace of Africa. Maybe the phrase "by any means necessary" has special relevance in the present context.

John Dolan: don't blame Africa!

The eXile is a Moscow-based, English-language alternative newspaper founded by American journalist Mark Ames ten years ago. The formidable columnist Matt Taibbi joined Ames not long thereafter.

The ongoing saga of the paper is apparently compelling enough that Good Machine, Ang Lee's (Brokeback Mountain) production company, is working on a feature film chronicling the story.

Will they include the scene wherein eXile staffers tossed a cream pie filled with horse semen in the face of New York Times Moscow Bureau Chief Michael Wines, in honor of their having picked him as "Worst Journalist in Russia"-? We'll have to wait and see.

John Dolan is another writer/editor on the eXile roster, and he penned an excellent, no-holds-barred review this week of a ludicrous book by Martin Meredith that attempts to pin the blame for the sorry state of Africa on Africans themselves, rather than the colonial powers who made a mess of things and then hightailed it out of there. The review is well worth a read - if nothing else, to inspire anyone who has aspirations to write an effective, engaging piece of polemic.

Global warming made explicit

Longtime Artic explorer Arved Fuchs was interviewed for Germany's Der Speigel Online, and he made no bones about the fact that the polar ice caps are disappearing at an astonishing rate.

Frankly, given the statistics that have appeared recently, it might not be unreasonable to revise our assessments - from "we'd better do something, quick" to "fuck, it's too late!"

If you don't believe me, you can view the accompanying slideshow documenting the disappearing ice caps here (11 images - click through to the maps at the end).