Author: Roy Berman

Karl Rove accused one year ago

I just got around to listening to last week’s episode of Off The Hook, the hacker radio show affiliated with 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, and heard something pretty interesting about the current mess with Valorie Plame, Karl Rove, et al. They played a brief clip from a presentation given by a Robert Steele almost exactly one year ago at the Fifth Hope hacker conference in New York City.

I don’t normally write anything about US politics, and I’m not even going to offer any comments this, aside from the fact that it’s kind of cool. However, I did attend this same conference in the year 2000, where I actually met Robert Steele, so let’s just say this falls under my blanket mission of writing about places where I’ve been.

The July 13, 2005 episode of Off The Hook can be downloaded in mp3 form from their web site. The following transript begins 40 minutes into the show.

Bernie S: You mentioned a while ago the need for a national traitor intelligence system. On that subject, what’s your take on the whole Valeie Plame outing, and who do you think did it?

Robert Steele: I think Scooter Libby in Dick Cheney’s office did it with Karl Rove’s explicit approval and Dick Cheney’s explicit concealment after the fact.

Bernie S: What are your feelings on it?

Robert Steele: I think it has the potential to be Al Capone’s tax return. It really does.

Bernie S: Do you think that this will ever be- where do you think this investigation will lead, regardless of who’s found to have done it?

Robert Steele: Well, part of our problem is that the Republicans control both houses of Congress and the moderate Republicans are being intimidated by the extremist Republicans and the people haven’t spoken. Right now the people don’t care about Valorie Plame’s outing. Inasumch as the vice presiden’t office, in my humble opinion, very flagrantly and deliberately violated a national law, I would like to see them brought to justice. i would like to see Dick Cheney brought to justice for sole-sourcing billions of dollars to Haliburton. you know these guys are bending or breaking every rule they can find. and the outing of Valorie Plame is i think one of the things that George Tenet simply had to be honest about and it let to his eventual resignation.

The man asking the questions is Bernie S, co-host of Off The Hook. Here is his official mini-bio from The Fifth Hope conference web page.

Bernie S. has been hacking computers, phones, radios, and the authorities for over 25 years – sometimes pushing the envelope too far. In 1995 he was imprisoned for one and a half years by the Secret Service for possessing hardware and software they said had the potential for abuse. Later the U.S. government admitted “there were no victims in the offense” and that they were more concerned about his exposing their covert activities. Bernie continues to investigate and report on communications technologies and government activities.

The man giving the talk is Robert Steele. His bio from the same web site reads:

Robert Steele is the author of On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World and The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political. He is the founder and CEO of OSS.Net, a global intelligence partnership and network that excels at both teaching and performing legal ethical intelligence collection, processing, and analysis. In the course of a 25 year national security career, Robert has served as a Marine Corps infantry officer and service level plans officer; fulfilled clandestine, covert action, and technical collection duties; been responsible for programming funds for overhead reconnaissance capabilities; contributed to strategic signals intelligence operations; managed an offensive counterintelligence program; initiated an advanced information technology project; and been the senior civilian responsible for founding a new national intelligence production facility. He was one of the first clandestine officers assigned the terrorist target on a full time basis in the 1980s and the first person, also in the 1980s, to devise advanced information technology applications relevant to clandestine operations.

Robert Steele’s web page is here.

Robert Steele’s entire presentation, from The Fifth Hope conference, along with those of every other speaker (and there is some great stuff in there), can be found in mp3 format on the web. His presentation is entitled “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Spying, 9-11, and Why We Continue to Screw Up” and is well worth a listen.

Ritsumeikan Swords


Continuing the recent trend of writing about alma maters, here’s something really fun I spotted when googling “Ritsumeikan.”

SWORDS OF THE RITSUMEIKAN TANRENJO

Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto had a small forge (tanrenjo) set up during World War II which made swords for the military and the war effort. The forge was led by Sakurai Masayuki, the second son of Sakurai (Manji) Masatsugu, a well known early gendai swordsmith. He originally signed Masatsuna. He worked in Fukuoka, Osaka, and Kyoto (Ritsumeikan University). He was an early teacher of Seiho Sumitani (Sumitani Masamine), who became a Ningen Kokuho Tosho (Living National Treasure Swordsmith) from Kanazawa.

Good lord, you have no idea how much I want one of these things. I’ve never been a big fan of class rings and that sort of junk, but a class SWORD-sign me up! Does it just seem like a good idea because I spent all of yesterday reading the new Harry Potter book inside as the typhoon raged across Taiwan?

Check out the original page for more photos and information.

Rutgers Proposal for Colleges Meets Alumnae Resistance

Rutgers Proposal for Colleges Meets Alumnae Resistance
By GEORGE JAMES

A Rutgers University task force is recommending creation of a college of arts and sciences that would standardize admissions criteria, graduation requirements and other procedures. Under the proposal, some Rutgers colleges would function as campuses, but no longer by name as colleges.

The suggestion, which is part of a 175-page report that is scheduled for release on Monday, was criticized yesterday by the Associate Alumnae of Douglass College, which introduced a Web site earlier in the day, savedouglasscollege.org, calling for the measure’s defeat. The group said the proposal would mean the end of Douglass College.

The university president, Richard L. McCormick, said in a telephone interview last night that the report would undergo months of discussion. He noted that the plan was not calling for a merger; the colleges would retain their distinct qualities.

“It recommends creating something that every other research university has, a college of arts and sciences,” Dr. McCormick said. “And it recommends calling our residential campuses what they are: residential campuses.”

He created the 75-member Task Force on Undergraduate Education in April 2004 to guarantee that in emphasizing research, Rutgers does not shortchange undergraduates on courses and access to faculty members. In addition, Dr. McCormick said, he wanted to bring unity to what he called “a patchwork quilt” of schools and programs situated in New Brunswick and Piscataway.

Besides Douglass, which is an all-women’s college, Rutgers College, Livingston College and University College would all be affected.

“What it does, it effectively ends Douglass College,” said Sheila Kelly Hampton, class of ’70, who is president of the Douglass alumnae group. “By calling it a campus, they just are talking about where someone happens to live. They don’t address many of the student life issues and program issues.”

Dr. McCormick disagreed. “Douglass will be as it is now, a women’s-only campus, and will continue to have its signature courses on women, retain its distinctive mission and continue to reflect its unique history,” he said.

Each individual college now sets its own criteria in certain areas, including admissions, honors programs and graduation requirements, and none have faculties of their own; they are served by a general faculty of arts and sciences, he said. A new college of arts and sciences, under a unified structure, would simplify standards for students, faculty and administrators, and get faculty members more involved with students, he added.

But the executive director of the alumnae, Rachel Ingber, class of ’83, said: “Eliminating colleges does not bring faculty closer to students. It creates one huge university where undergraduates don’t have small colleges where they can get academic advice on curriculum programs and the unique mission that Douglass College provides for women.”

This may be removed from our usual topics, but since I am a Rutgers graduate, and I know a number of other Rutgers alumni read this blog, I just wanted to point out this important development concerning the school.

The current president of Rutgers University previously managed to scuttle a recent plan proposed by our former governor James McGreevey to merge Rutgers university with the states other medical and research oriented universities. This plan would have done little to improve the quality of medical education or research, while confusing the organization of the university as a whole. The previous plan was entirely based around the medical and research divisions of the universities involved, which included Rutgers, UMDNJ, NJIT and possibly others, while providing no reasonable plan for the administration of liberal arts and undergraduate departments. This current report seems to be a response to that, confirming that undergraduate education must be a priority at public universities.

I haven’t yet read the actual report (although I intend to), but after spending four years at Rutgers, New Brunswick I’m rather familiar with the organizational structure of the university. As it currently stands, Rutgers New Brunswick is actually a network of several nearby campuses in the neighboring towns of New Brunswick and Piscataway, linked through a system of free buses. As a large university, Rutgers consists of several different colleges, and each college is associated with a different campus. Each college has a unique history and origin, and today there are five liberal arts colleges, which share a common faculty of arts and sciences, and a number of specialty schools, each of which has their own faculty for their specialized programs. Students in specialty schools (such as Engineering, Pharmacy, Mason Gross School of the Arts etc.) also take at least a basic number of liberal arts classes as well, which are the same classes that members of the five liberal arts colleges take.

Here is a brief summary of the history, characteristics, and my thoughts on the future of the four liberal arts colleges, in chronological order of their founding:

Continue reading Rutgers Proposal for Colleges Meets Alumnae Resistance

Headlines

New light thrown on origins of Chinese culture as lost civilization emerges

One of the world’s great cities once flourished here at Jinsha village in China’s southwest, the 1000 B.C. equivalent of New York or Paris, and then inexplicably vanished, leaving no trace behind in the historical records.

Until recently, locals had no idea they were living on top of a great lost bronze-age civilization.

Myanmar Woman ‘suddenly grows penis’

Medical doctor Aye Sanda Khaing put it in layman’s terms in a local journal: “Her penis appeared at the site of her clitoris,” the doctor was quoted as saying.

Regardless of the official findings, local villagers and other curious Myanmar nationals are flocking to the Aung Myay Thar Yar pagoda, in this new satellite township 19km from Yangon, to see Than Sein for themselves and make donations to him or the temple.

Up to 400 gather at the pagoda each day, often in a courtyard under colorful umbrellas to ward off the sun’s rays, waiting for the chance to talk with and touch Than Sein.

Japanese researchers invent promising new HIV drug

The drug’s main feature is that it shuts out the AIDS virus at the point when it tries to intrude into a human cell.

Current AIDS medicines can lose their effectiveness in a few days when the virus changes and develops a resistance to those drugs. But AK602 is different because it reacts to human cells instead of attacking the virus, Mitsuya said.


Developers and purists erase Mecca’s history

Sami Angawi, an expert on the region’s Islamic architecture, said 1,400-year-old buildings from the early Islamic period risk being demolished to make way for high rise towers for Muslims flocking to perform the annual pilgrimage to Islam’s holiest city.

“We are witnessing now the last few moments of the history of Mecca,” Angawi told Reuters. “Its layers of history are being bulldozed for a parking lot,” he added.

Angawi estimated that over the past 50 years at least 300 historical buildings had been leveled in Mecca and Medina, another Muslim holy city containing the prophet’s tomb.

Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia’s dominant doctrine which promotes a strict narrow interpretation of Islam, was largely to blame, he said.

‘Evil dragon’ snared via online game

TAIPEI (Reuters) – Taiwan police captured a heavily armed fugitive whom they had been tracking for more than a year Wednesday after he exposed his whereabouts by playing online computer games.

Taiwan evening newspapers said Chang Hsi-ming, wanted for murder, illegal possession of weapons and multiple kidnappings, was found via his Internet protocol address after police found out he often played games online.

The head of Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau personally led the siege against Chang’s hideout in central Taiwan, with more than 130 police and two armored vehicles as he was known to be armed with assault rifles and hand grenades.

Chang was shot in the chest and shoulder during a gun battle and taken to hospital.

Police had offered a T$10 million (US$312,500) reward for information leading to the capture of Chang, dubbed the “evil dragon” by local press.

Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintaro sued for insane claim that ‘French cannot be used to count’

Translated from Yomiuru. Do I really need to comment? Whether or not the suit has any legal merit, Ishihara is a complete and total nutjob.

Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintaro being sued for statement that “French is disqualified from international use”

The head of a Tokyo French language school filed suit on July 13th against Tokyo prefectural governor Ishihara Shintaro (72) in response to his statement that “French is unable to count numbers, and so is disqualified from use as an international language.” In the suit, which was presented to the Tokyo district court, the plaintiff claims that the governor’s statement “damaged my reputation and interfered with my business” and is demanding total damages to the order of ￥10,500,000, as well as a public apology.

The plaintiff is Malik Berkane, head of the Class de France (Tokyo Minato-ku), as well as 21 other French interpreters/translators and researchers.

According to the complaint, the statement in question was uttered in October of last year during a meeting of the General Support Foundation for the Establishment of a Metropolitan University of Tokyo at the Tokyo governmental office. Teachers from the former Prefectural University’s literature faculty, which includes French, were speaking in opposition to the establishment of the new university, which decreased the size of their faculty. Ishihara, in addition to his statements on “French’s disqualification” also said that “it is utterly ridiculous that that these people still clinging to French are opposed to the opening of this school.”

The plantiff’s claim states that “It is in fact possible to count in French, and it is also a common language in international organizations.”

According to the governor’s office, “Because the complaint has not yet been delivered, we cannot offer any comment at this time.”

Two busted with illicit beef

Today’s Taipei Times has this brief news item.

Two people were caught last Wednesday at the CKS International Airport trying to bring in beef from Japan, despite a ban on its import, the Taipei Customs Offices said yesterday. Japan is the only Asian victim of mad cow disease and has reported 20 cases since September 2001. The government has banned the import of Japanese beef since 2001. Inspectors seized nearly 20kg of frozen beef from the luggage of the two passengers, including a Taiwanese and a Japanese, when they arrived from Tokyo aboard a China Airlines flight. The smuggled beef was shipped to a quarantine center in Hsinchu where it will be destroyed.

It’s almost funny that Japan, which has had 20 confirmed cases of mad cow disease, has banned beef from the US, which has had no cases of human transmission in that same time period.

Is blogging a good idea at all?

I get tremendously tired of all the self congratulatory talk about blogging that goes around on many blogs and don’t believe that I’ve ever posted anything of the sort, but there’s a first time for everything.

This column published today at the tech news and analysis site Ars Technica is a little troubling and raises some serious doubts about whether somebody who is even considering going into academia in the future should be blogging at all.

Blogging and job prospects: from the academy to the SCOTUS

Here’s the meatiest excerpt, but I would, as always, recommend reading the entire piece.

Ultimately, I think the answer to this dilemma is pretty clear: graduate students simply should not blog, and if they do blog they should never do so under their real names. As a grad student, your writing time is much better spent producing papers that will get you feedback from the folks who you’re paying to study under. Furthermore, anything that you have to say that’s even remotely interesting to anyone other than your parents and your best friend from childhood is not worth publishing online when it could easily come back to haunt you years later. And the more interesting and relevant your comments on the pressing issues of the day, the more you should keep them strictly confined to the kinds of everyday offline intellectual conversations that make academic life so rewarding.

Publishing edited content in an online venue is also very risky for graduate students, especially if you’re staking out a position on a highly charged topic. I know of at least one fellow grad student who failed the final round of a job search thanks to comments of his a on hot-button social issue that were published in the house organ of his denomination. Apparently, he came down on the opposite side of that issue from some influential faculty on the job search committee, and his candidacy was sunk.

Harutoshi Fukui and Japan’s SDF fiction

The NYT today has a neat article by the very prolific Norimitsu Onishi entitled For a Hungry Audience, a Japanese Tom Clancy.

This year, three big-budget war movies based on Mr. Fukui’s stories are being released here, a sign of how much Japan itself has changed in the short time that he has risen from obscurity to pop culture prominence. Unlike Hollywood, Japan’s film industry traditionally avoided making movies with military themes, especially ones in which the military was portrayed heroically.

What is more, the Self-Defense Forces used to participate mainly in “Godzilla” movies, typically keeping public order as the lizard ran amok. But for the first time in postwar Japan, this year’s movies, with the full cooperation of the military, show the armed forces doing what they have yet to do in the real world since World War II: fight and kill.

“It can undoubtedly be attributed to the times,” Mr. Fukui said.

Mr. Fukui sat down for an interview here on Monday, looking a little out of place, underdressed in jeans and a T-shirt, in the Imperial Hotel’s lobby cafe. While demure about his success – “my life hasn’t changed that much,” Mr. Fukui said – he seemed a little weary, perhaps somehow world-weary, compared with his demeanor during an interview in April in his neighborhood in eastern Tokyo.

Back then, the first movie, “Lorelei: The Witch of the Pacific Ocean,” a World War II tale of a Japanese submarine that foils American plans to drop a third atomic bomb, on Tokyo, was already a certified hit. In June, the second movie, “Sengoku Jieitai 1549,” or “Samurai Commando Mission 1549,” was released, offering a story of Self-Defense Forces sent back in time to a Japan riven by civil war.

This month, “Bokoku no Aegis,” or “A Lost Country’s Aegis,” will open, featuring some of Japan’s biggest male stars in a story about a terrorist who infiltrates a Japanese military vessel. The terrorist in the novel is clearly identified as North Korean; in the movie, though, he could be from either North Korea or China, two countries with which Japan’s relations have recently worsened.

Adamu has previously blogged about the remake of Sengoku Jieitai, the original version of which was actually released in the US under the silly title GI Samurai. I should, however, clarify Onishi’s article. Mr. Fukui did not write the novel that Sengoku Jieitai 1549 was based on. It is a remake of a 1979 film, which was itself based on a novel by Ryo Hanmura. Mr. Fukui only helped with updating the story, presumably because of his Tom Clancy-like (or if you will, otaku-like) knowledge of today’s SDF.

Unfortunately, according to these Amazon user reviews the remake actually compares very poorly with the original, an opinion which this decently detailed review at IMDB agrees with.

Here is IMDB’s plot summary of the original film, Sengoku Jieitai (Japan’s Self Defense Forces in the warring states period).

A squadron of Japanese Self-Defense Force soldiers find themselves transported through time to their country’s warring states era, when rival samurai clans were battling to become the supreme Shogun. The squad leader, Lt. Iba, sees this as the perfect opportunity to realize his dream of becoming the ruler of Japan. To achieve this, he teams his troops up with those of Kagatori, a samurai daimyo who also aspires to become Shogun. Are either of these power-hungry warriors to be trusted?

Here you can see the trailer for the original 1979 version, courtesy of Amazon Japan. I haven’t yet had a chance to see the film, but aside from the bizzarely inappropriate music it seems very cool.

And here is the trailer for the remake. It may not have the charm of the original, but from the trailer it looks to have a level of big budget production quality that has been very, very scarce in Japanese films for a number of years. And shit, even a film about time traveling soldiers fighting Oda Nobunaga has got to be less corny than Tom Cruise as The Last Samurai.