Tomorrow night, we are told, is The Big Speech, wherein George W. Bush will put forth his new strategy for moving forward in Iraq. Already, there have a number of references to this being “the most important speech the President will give,” the idea being that if he can’t sell the American public on his Iraq strategy, he’s screwed.

According to the Times, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow today

declined to discuss specifics of Mr. Bush’s speech, planned for Wednesday, although the president is widely expected to ask for at least a short-term increase of about 20,000 troops as part of a broader plan. Mr. Snow said the speech would be “the beginning of an important consideration of how we move forward in Iraq.”

Yeah, he’s screwed.

Granted, it is in the interest of politicians, pundits, and the media to keep us all guessing and hoping about what the President might announce tomorrow night. Honestly, though—does anyone except the most die-hard of Bush voters really believe that he is going to come up with anything besides an escalation of troop levels with vaguely-defined goals like “securing the peace”? Announcing a fundamentally different strategy would undermine everything for which the President has argued since the war’s start. It would be an explicit admission that his War on Terror was flawed from the get-go, and that’s just not something George W. Bush is ever going to do.

Over and over for the past month, we have heard one pundit after another talk about how the President (and therefore the country) has one chance left to turn around the situation in Iraq. The problem, though, is that we have been down this road any number of times before.

Not having a Lexis-Nexis subscription, I can’t say for sure, but I would be willing to bet that a search on “Iraq” and “the next six months are a critical time” would turn up thousands of hits, stretching all the way back to the war’s beginning. We have heard this sort of claim repeatedly from war supporters, with an ever-sliding start-date of those six months. Always, things are about to change, we are told. If only we stick to it and show our resolve, we will achieve victory. If not, then we are defeatists.

Technically, this endless hope that eventually something good has to happen in Iraq is not an example of the Gambler’s Fallacy. The Gambler’s Fallacy is the mistaken belief that past events will influence future outcomes in a random situation—in other words, “I’ve been losing so long, I must be due for a win.” However, the Iraq war is obviously not a bunch random events, which makes the magical thinking on the part of the Bush administration and its supporters even worse than the Gambler’s Fallacy.

No, what we have here that more of the very thing that has aggravated and worsened the situation will somehow make everything better. We just have to wait a little longer, you see, and then everything will work out. That would be something more along the lines of “The Idiot’s Fallacy.”

Since I rarely have anything good to say about Verizon, I feel that I should at least give them some credit for what would seem to be recent upgrades to their network equipment. For about the last two weeks, I have consistently been getting EV-DO coverage in the Mid-Hudson Valley area, as opposed to the 1x service I had been getting up until this point.

So what, you ask?

The 1x wireless interface standard that is widely deployed in the U.S. has a top-end data transfer rate of 144 kilobits per second. That’s fine for voice calls, and, assuming you have a strong signal, will support bare-bones data transfer. On the other hand, the version of the EV-DO standard that is currently being deployed can get up to about 2.5 megabits per second, which is roughly the same speed as most home cable modem broadband connections.

The reason this upgrade is cool is that it means I can carry the Internets around in my pocket. My phone is an HTC Apache, which has a decent-sized screen for a hand-held and runs Windows Mobile 5.0. With good EV-DO coverage, I’ve found that I can browse the web at just about the same speed as I’m used to with my cable connection at home. Obviously, reading a website on a 2″ by 3″ display is not ideal, but it’s fine for getting directions, phone numbers, headlines, etc.

More importantly, it solves the issue of not having a media player. Sure, I could drop $350 on an 80GB iPod. However, I’ve got 60+GB of music sitting on an Internet-accessible server at home. I would then have to copy all that music over to the iPod, and keep syncing it whenever I get new stuff (which is fairly often). iPod owners go through this rigmarole all the time, but it strikes me as overly cumbersome. In addition, I find iTunes to be an exceptionally annoying application.

With the phone and decent broadband coverage, I can instead stream music from my hard drive at home directly to the phone, as well as listen to any other streaming media sources. That’s pretty damn cool.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. In theory, there’s nothing stopping someone from creating, say, a VoIP client that runs on Windows Mobile. Assuming my cellular service provider charges me a flat-fee for data connectivity and then wants me to buy some number of minutes for voice calls, I could simply run the VoIP client and avoid paying for any minutes. I’m sure greater minds than mine are hard at work imagining all sorts of other nifty uses to which this technology can be put.

For me, this is where it’s at when it comes to Internet connectivity and media transmission. Don’t make me go through some stupid, proprietary process to download limited, encumbered content. Don’t force me to keep transferring copies of the same files from one storage medium to another. Sell me a pipe and devices that connect to either end, and I’ll take it from there.

Of course, such a content-neutral utopia is unlikely to ever actually become reality. Traditional content providers want to maintain control of their content, and the companies that formerly provided only the transport medium (ISP’s, telcos, cable companies, etc.) are looking to get in on the content side as well. Most consumers, meanwhile, operate in a realm somewhere between mildly befuddled and utterly ignorant regarding the actual technology behind the services for which they pay. They are and will remain content to pay for whatever half-assed deal their provider offers them.

My hope is that the gears of corporate ineptitude churn slowly and inefficiently enough that a reasonable middle road can continue to be found between the extremes of pie-in-the-sky, “The information wants to be free”-style dreamland and complete top-down control of content and transmission.

UPDATE: The new drive is installed and happy. The process ended up taking about half an hour, most of which was spent trying to figure out how to get stupid power cables to stretch to all the different stuff inside the box.

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I don’t know exactly when it’s going to happen, but there will be some downtime for the site this weekend.

A shiny new 320GB drive arrived in the mail today, so I’ll be taking the server that runs this site down to do the install. While there will be some data migration taking place once the hardware is back up and running, none of it involves the site, so the outage should be fairly brief.

The addition of this drive will take me up to just over half a terabyte of storage in this box. Every time I’ve bought a new drive in the past, I have said something along the lines of “I’ll never fill this up!” Then, six months later, I’m shocked to discover that the drive is almost full. Consequently, I’m making no predictions about how long this one will last me.

With the Democrats taking over control of both houses of Congress, it is amusing to watch the Republicans suddenly discover the word “bipartisanship.”

Having spent the better part of the last ten years effectively locking minority Democrats out of any meaningful participation in the legislative process, Republican Senators and especially House members are reduced to pleading for input. It’s difficult not to have a degree of sympathy for the poor Republicans. Such has been their lock on power in Congress since the Nineties that many of them have literally no concept of what it means to be a minority. Faced with the sudden realization that they no longer get to pass whatever legislation they want and manipulate the process for their own political ends, they are in a state of near-panic.

Okay, so it’s actually very difficult to have any sympathy for the Republicans.

At the same time, the liberal blogosphere is awash with angry articles about the double-standards evident in most mainstream media coverage of the changeover of power.

The argument is that the press largely sat idly by while Republicans completely ignored the minority party and generally trashed the joint while they controlled the House and the Senate. Now, though, we one article after another whether Democrats will “change the tone” in Washington and welcome Republican input. It’s not fair, the blogs claim, because no one was asking these same questions of the Republicans.

This conversation is hardly even worth having, though, for several reasons. First, it’s pointless, as the press is going to stick to the accepted narratives, regardless of how many left-wing bloggers complain about them. Second, and more importantly, Democrats should be happy that they are held to a higher standard than Republicans. It is an implicit acknowledgment of the fact that everyone expects Republicans to cheat, game the system, and viciously pursue purely partisan ends. Democrats, meanwhile, are expected to operate in and open and balanced manner, to clean up the mess and restore the dignity of Congress.

That’s not such a bad standard to which to be held, and one of which liberals should be proud. Both sides of the aisle need to quit their whining.

We have gone through quite a bit of trouble over Jose Padilla, beginning with then-Attorney General John Aschcroft’s breathless description five years ago of a shadowy plot to detonate a radiological weapon.

A U.S. citizen, Mr. Padilla was declared “an enemy combatant,” a term made up more or less on the spot by the Bush Administration. Solely on the say-so (details of which are, of course classified) of the White House, Padilla was then stripped of his Constitutional rights while simultaneously being denied protection under the Geneva Conventions. He then disappeared into the hole of “military detention,” where, we found out subsequently, he was systematically maltreated and abused.

Meanwhile, the government, faced with the possibility that the Supreme Court might rule against their already shaky claims regarding Padilla’s status as an enemy combatant, abruptly changed tactics. His case was shifted to a criminal prosecution.

So surely, after all of that, the government must have a serious and frightening case against this deadly extremist, right? Think again. According to the New York Times, the government’s case will be based on recorded phone calls:

Tens of thousands of conversations were recorded. Some 230 phone calls form the core of the government’s case, including 21 that make reference to Mr. Padilla, prosecutors said. But Mr. Padilla’s voice is heard on only seven calls. And on those seven, which The Times obtained from a participant in the case, Mr. Padilla does not discuss violent plots.

Seven calls.

Right-wing supporters of the administration would have us believe that the reason Padilla’s prosecution is such a train wreck is that the government has been ham-strung by lilly-livered civil libertarians who don’t understand that 9/11 changed everything. In their feverish fantasy world, evil terrorists are everywhere and all-powerful, and can only be defeated if the lawyers and the liberals would just let Jack Bauer do his job. Torture? Illegal wiretapping? Opening peoples’ mail without a warrant? It’s all fine, as long as the President says he’s doing it for the good of the American people.

The problem is, among other things, that this administration isn’t even good at what they claim to be doing. They screw up everything they touch, and Padilla’s detention is the perfect example. As I mentioned a while back, the government has botched the case so badly that no one will ever be able to make heads or tails of it. Is Padilla really a threat, or just someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong skin color? We’ll never know, because the government’s bull-in-a-china-shop approach has destroyed any semblance of credibility.

Having little interest in cowboy fiction or anything that even vaguely resembles cowboy fiction, I had never read any of Cormac McCarthy’s books. They always seem to be purchased by late-little-aged men, alongside Patrick O’Brian and Wallace Stegner novels, and it just seemed like a whole scene that was best avoided.

However, reading reviews of The Road, I was surprised to learn that its setting was post-apocalyptic. Intrigued, I got it from the library.

I’m glad I did. It’s a quick read, only about 250 pages, and broken up into short sections that generally run just a few paragraphs in length. Good thing, too—much longer, and this incredibly bleak tale would be difficult to take.

The story is a simple one. Something horrendously bad (I’m assuming nuclear attack, but that is never explicitly stated) has happened to at least the United States and perhaps the rest of the world some years prior to the novel’s timeline. Society has collapsed, large percentages of the population have been killed, cities and countryside have been thoroughly looted and scavenged, and survivors are left to fend for themselves, some by violence and canabalism, others by less unsavory but equally desperate means. The book follows a father and his young son as they cross the country, hoping to get to some undefined place where things might not be quite so bad.

Some aspects of McCarthy’s technique didn’t sit well with me—the two main characters are never named, but rather are referred to as “the man,” “the boy,” etc. There are also a few isolated and unexplained jumps in perspective. I have a pet peeve about reading stories where the author’s hand is showing, and McCarthy veers dangerously close to that here.

However, as with the aforementioned bleakness, the brevity of the book works in its favor here. In addition, a large part of what The Road is about is the stripping away of one’s experiences, memories, and, therefore, one’s identity. The paucity of detail and backstory works in that regard to keep the reader focused, like the protagonists, squarely on the immediate situation. There is no time in this story for reflection—these people have lost all the trappings of civilization and are just barely eeking out their existence.

So, not the most uplifting of reads, but worth the small amount of time it takes to finish this novel. I’m still not going to read All the Pretty Horses.