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Stan the Man

I have never met the General. I have however met two of his brothers.

Of the two brothers I met, one seemed to have integrity… although he once told me a story that disturbed me involving him shooting a neighbor’s dog and seemingly enjoying it. The other brother, in the end, seemed to have few redeeming features and no moral compass I could recognize other than doing whatever it took to get ahead. I guess over time we’ll see how General McChrystal, who to me is the “third brother”, fares. Now, I know that it is not proper to judge someone by their family, but overall I can tell you that if the General is anything at all like his siblings, the thought of him in charge of anything strikes fear into my heart. The bits below from and old Esquire story don’t inspire any additional confidence.

Acts of Conscience
(John H. Richardson, Esquire, 1 Jul 2006)

“Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel. ‘Will

ever be allowed in here?’ And he said absolutely not. He had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there’s no way that the Red Cross could get in: “they won’t have access and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating, even Army investigators.”

…

They could keep a prisoner on his feet for twenty hours, and although the rules required them to allow each prisoner four hours of sleep every twenty-four hours, nowhere did it say those four hours had to be consecutive–so sometimes they’d wake the prisoners up every half hour. Eventually they’d just collapse. “This was a very demanding method for the interrogators as well, because it required a lot of staff to monitor the prisoner, and we’d have to stay awake, too,” Jeff says. “And it’s just impossible to interrogate someone when he’s in that state, collapsed on the ground. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Within the unit, the interrogators got the feeling they were reporting to the highest levels. The colonel would tell an interrogator that his report “is on Rumsfeld’s desk this morning” or that it was “read by SecDef.” “That’s a big morale booster after a fourteen-hour day,” Jeff says with a tinge of irony. “Hey, we got to the White House.”

…

“Was the colonel ever actually there to observe this?” “Oh, yeah. He worked there. He had his desk there. They were working in a big room where the analysts, the report writers, the sergeant major, the colonel, some technical guys–they’re all in that room.”

…

To Garlasco, this is significant. This means that a full-bird colonel and all his support staff knew exactly what was going on at Camp Nama. “Do you know where the colonel was getting his orders from?” he asks. Jeff answers quickly, perhaps a little defiantly. “I believe it was a two-star general. I believe his name was General McChrystal. I saw him there a couple of times.” Back when he was an intelligence analyst, Garlasco had briefed Stanley McChrystal once. He remembers him as a tall Irishman with a gentle manner. He was head of the Joint Special Operations Command, the logical person to oversee Task Force 121, and vice-director for operations for the Joint Chiefs.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

I have mentioned General McChrystal before on this blog here and here.

DVD: Blue Planet: Seas of Life (Discovery Channel Version): Disk 1

So, I think it was last weekend, but I do get confused, it was time for another DVD we own but have not watched yet. In this case it was Blue Planet which Brandy had given me for Christmas. Now, one thing that is interesting here is that there appear to be multiple versions of this out there. Brandy gave me the Discovery Channel version. There is also a BBC version. They seem to be basically the same thing, but with the episodes in a different order, and on some disks a different narrator. I think extras are different too. Wikipedia has more info.

Anyway, both Brandy and Amy had other things to do that night, so I watched the first disk on my own. On the version I have, the first two episodes were “Frozen Seas” and “Coral Seas”. As usual for this kind of documentary, both episodes were full of absolutely stunning photography and amazing views of the wildlife. I watched on the big projector screen, so it was all very immersive.

Two particular scenes really stood out for me though.

First, penguins swimming… rocketing… underwater at high speed, leaving cavitation trails behind them, and then shooting up out of the water onto the ice.

Second, coral… usually perceived as static and unmoving background to the other wildlife, plantlike at best, and more often rock like, shown in time lapse exhibiting its animal nature, moving and surging and reacting… and even fighting!

I do like this kind of documentary, and I liked these two episodes. More to come later down the road, as this is a five disk set.

Curmudgeon’s Corner: Dribbles of News

Sam and Ivan talk about:

Missing Mail
Swine Flu
Stressed Ivan
Arlen Specter

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Note: For those using the “View in iTunes” link, it often takes iTunes quite a few hours to show a new episode after the episode is posted here. So if you are looking for the podcast very soon after I post this, use one of the other methods to find the new episode. For those who are subscribed, your Podcast software should pick up the new episode next time it checks for new episodes on its own, or you can always force a refresh. For those using the XML feed directly, the new episode is now there.

Last Swine Flu Dashboard Enhancements

Well, last for tonight anyway, it is way past my bedtime.

I switched things around so the main page of the Swine Flu Dashboard is a “Summary View” with only the “all data so far” graphs of the six things being tracked (deaths, cases and death rate worldwide and US only). For these I changed the trend line to be based off of a one week time period. There isn’t yet a full week of data, so that means the entire trend line may still shift. Parts of it will turn red once those parts are “fixed”.

I have then moved off onto a separate “time frame view” looks at each of those six numbers on a “previous week”, “previous month” and “previous year” basis. Obviously these will be more interesting once there is data over a longer time period. For this view I’ve made the trend lines dependent on which time frame you are looking at. They are based on 2 days for the weekly view, 2 weeks for the monthly view and 2 months for the yearly view.

Anyway… that’s it for tonight.

Swine Flu Dashboard Adjustment

After watching the updates over the past day, it became clear that the CDC was only updating once per day, while Wikipedia was updating constantly as new information came in. When there was a CDC update, that data would get reflected in Wikipedia very quickly. So overall for responsiveness, Wikipedia was a better source. So I changed the data source for the US numbers on the Swine Flu Dashboard to be Wikipedia, just as with my world numbers. (Links to the specific Wikipedia data sources on the Swine Flu Dashboard itself.)

Also, using the magic of wiki history, I went back and backfilled my data to include at least one data point per six hour interval going back to April 30th (UTC). Before that in the wiki history it seems like the standard for what was a “confirmed” case was not yet clear, and so numbers had been reported differently and were higher.

Anyway, now the four times a day update for the US numbers will actually catch changes more than once a day, and the historical numbers are just as nicely filled out as the new numbers.

Oh, and the curves are actually starting to look a bit exponential now, whereas they had previously been looking more linear.

Woo!

Feeling Blue

About an hour ago we got out of the latest ultrasound… It’s a boy!

And everything else looked normal and as expected for this stage as well.

So all is well! September here we come…

Swine Flu Acceleration

I find myself bored waiting for the new daily data points on the Swine Flu Dashboard so I have accelerated data collection from once per day to four times per day (random times within each 6 hour interval) starting in a few hours at 0 UTC.

Addition to Swine Flu Dashboard

I added death rates (deaths/cases) to the suite of charts on the Swine Flu Dashboard.

Still updated once a day at random times, but to make the ratio correct, I now grab the deaths and cases data at the same time of day in each geographic grouping, although worldwide and US will generally be updated at different times.

Swine Flu Dashboard

Despite my strong suspicion that this whole thing is over hyped, noticing that most (if not all) places I’ve seen are just giving totals, rather than trends over time, I’ve gone ahead and set up a Swine Flu Dashboard giving charts over time on confirmed cases and deaths on a worldwide and US only basis. The data is taken from Wikipedia for the worldwide numbers (as the way the WHO website presented the data was more difficult to grab) and from the CDC for the US numbers. I got data from the last few days manually, but the charts are now set to update automatically on a daily basis.

I’ll leave this going until either it becomes a pain for some reason, or the hype bubble pops and nobody cares any more.

Note: Yeah, yeah, H1N1. Whatever. Swine Flu.

Kemp

Just got the CNN Breaking News alert on my phone. Jack Kemp is dead. I remember thinking that he (along with Dole) back in 1996 were decent well meaning folks even if I disagreed with them on a lot.

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Stan the Man

DVD: Blue Planet: Seas of Life (Discovery Channel Version): Disk 1

Curmudgeon’s Corner: Dribbles of News

Last Swine Flu Dashboard Enhancements

Swine Flu Dashboard Adjustment

Feeling Blue

Swine Flu Acceleration

Addition to Swine Flu Dashboard

Swine Flu Dashboard

Kemp

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