Blog Editing Software
Since I’ve turned my Windows machine into a full time HTPC, I’ve had to shift my blogging to my Powerbook. So i started using Ecto instead of Windows Live Writer – which is an amazing and free product for those on that platform.
Powerful functionality, easy to set up and use, and its an affordable $18. (Don’t waste any time trying to get an answer out of the author though. Its a particularly unhelpful one man show.)
Now to find an RSS solution that works –
The Windows machine had the great (and free) Jetbrains Omea Reader which had annotation tools that, to me anyway, were very useful. Flagging, comments, and a cool clipping system with the ability to search it all. Having a tough time finding something powerful instead of pretty in terms of Mac RSS readers.
Review: Lucky Number Slevin
Simple and tight script, accentuated violence, bright colors and artistic set design. Several stars – I’m a major fan of Ben Kingsly – thrown in result in a solid flick, but there’s nothing epic going on here.
Kevin Drum On Petraeus IO
Drum outlines the specifics of the information op:
Petraeus has been very shrewd about providing dog-and-pony shows to as many analysts, pundits, reporters, and members of Congress as he could cram into the military jets criss-crossing the Atlantic to Baghdad on a seemingly daily basis this summer. And those dog-and-pony shows don’t seem to have been subtle: rather, they’ve been hard-sell propositions complete with “classified” PowerPoint presentations (always a winner for people with more ego than common sense); visits to a handpicked selection of the most successful reconstruction teams in the country; a plainly deceptive implication that the surge played a role in the Anbar Awakening; feel-good stories about how local power generation is a good thing; the recent insistence that civilian casualties are down, which increasingly looks like a book-cooking scam that wouldn’t stand the light of day if Petraeus allowed independent agencies access to his data; and, of course, the ongoing campaign to scare everyone by kinda sorta claiming that Iran and al-Qaeda are ramping up their activities and then getting suddenly slippery whenever anyone asks if they have any real evidence for this.
Then says that the upcoming report to Congress (on 9/11) will be:
Petraeus is still a smart guy. He won’t go too far overboard. But he’s obviously been treating the September report like a military operation, trying to generate as much good press and congressional change of heart as he possibly can in the weeks leading up to 9/11. I now expect him to provide just the opposite of what I thought before: a consistently upbeat report studded with just enough accomodations to reality to keep him from seeming completely ridiculous.
He’s right.
Details On The Iran Attack
This paper provides some excellent data on the upcoming attack on Iran. It’s pulled together with open source intel and some pretty good thinking.
Most significantly, Plesch and Butcher dispute conventional wisdom that any US attack on Iran would be confined to its nuclear sites. Instead, they foresee a “full-spectrum approach,” designed to either instigate an overthrow of the government or reduce Iran to the status of “a weak or failed state.”
Also smart: They’re ignoring what capabilities Iran actually has in terms of WMDs, and is instead operating with what they could possess. Something that the Israeli’s have to do.
Sidenote: Larry Johnson is quoted:
“The report seems to accept without question that US air force and navy bombers could effectively destroy Iran and they seem to ignore the fact that US use of air power in Iraq has failed to destroy all major military, political, economic and transport capabilities,” said Johnson late Monday after the embargo on the study had been lifted.
Anyway, its a fun 80 page read that I’m still wading through. Lots of specifics.