Do I Ever Sleep?

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A fellow student asked me a question this morning that I get a lot (at least twice a week, lately): Do I ever sleep?
Yes I sleep at least 7-8 hours a night, or my whole world falls apart. Thanks for asking.
Oh, okay. Sometimes I have to work late, or I’ll start writing a song and get kind of obsessive about not going to bed until I finish the lyrics, or I’ll go to a concert or an event get home at dawn, or whatever. I’m not a saint.
At Foo Camp, for example, I was just too excited most of the time to get to bed before 2 or 3 in the morning, even though I knew I had to be up early in the morning to work on my movies.
But for the most part, during the week. Sleep is a fundamental requirement that I very rarely compromise.
To those of you operating on less than 8 hours a night, I highly recommend either going to bed earlier or waking up later, depending on your other obligations. It may seem like you’re getting less done at first, due to time constraints, but I predict that your productivity will increase by as much as 25% in the short term and as much as 50% in the long term (how it worked out for me).

Daily Show On The Shrub’s Trip To Asia

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Highlights include: the Shrub in traditional Thailand attire, the First Lady waiting to hear her Manchurian Candidate trigger word, and Colin Powell informing us all that plutonium is not edible. (Damn. The Manchurian Candidate thing is in a later clip.)
This is from the October 21, 2003 program.

The Shrub’s Trip To Asia (Small – 8 MB)













The Daily Show (The best news on television.)

John Perry Barlow: From Burning Man To Running Man

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Man does John Perry have a way with words.

If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he’d have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then… ignore them. It’s a pretty safe bet that they won’t be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build…
Hey, maybe he’ll turn out to be a terrific Governor. Weirder things have happened, and lately in abundance. Maybe he will demonstrate such administrative genius that he will surgically remove 9 billion dollars of fatty deposits from California’s budget without devastating public services. Maybe he will get the state back on track without either raising taxes or holding Enron accountable for the billions they swindled from his state.
But I kind of doubt it. This is a man who wanted to be adored just like Hitler, as he himself put it. This is a man whose record of boorish sexual impositions would bar him from employment in any Fortune 500 company. Not only is he macho, he *is* macho. He is arrogant, distorted, and possibly the most narcissistic person in Hollywood. (Which would make him, I guess, just about the most narcissistic person in the Milky Way galaxy.) His primary assets are good bones, great teeth, killer name recognition, and a wife whose loyalty exceeds even Hillary Clinton’s. Yet the people of California turned out in record numbers a couple of Tuesdays ago and gave him everything but a blowjob.

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A Husband’s First Hand Account Of Waiting At Home While His Medic Wife Searched for WMD In Iraq

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This disorganized operation continues to needlessly rip apart the lives of many a dedicated individual. This story really drives the point home.
The kicker for me was to learn that the troops themselves are expected to buy the supplies for the goose chase!

Mommy’s Back From Iraq
By John E. Bugay Jr. for the Post Gazette.

My wife, Sgt. Bethany Airel, was a Reserve medic in the 203rd Military Intelligence Battalion, the Army’s contribution to the Iraqi Survey Group, the lead entity in the ongoing search for weapons of mass destruction. For what it accomplished, the 203rd probably ought never to have gone. The Pentagon admitted as much in a “secret report” that, thankfully, was reported on by Rowan Scarborough of The Washington Times on Sept. 3: “Weapons of mass destruction elimination and exploitation planning efforts did not occur early enough in the process to allow Centcom to effectively execute the mission. . . . Insufficient U.S. government assets existed to accomplish the mission.”
We didn’t know this in February, when she was activated, when President Bush and his administration were telling us that war with Iraq was imperative to stop Saddam Hussein from distributing his WMDs to terrorist groups that would bring them to America.
Based on reports of a potential “scorched earth” policy by Saddam, Beth spent the next several months training to don her MOPP (Mission Oriented Protective Posture) gear quickly. I never managed to get beyond a debilitating sense of despondency. Nevertheless, I got into a daily schedule of waking the kids for school, packing lunches, seeing them off and then sitting with my 4-year-old daughter while she cried, “I miss Mommy.”
February was a “lockdown” month, but as the start of the war was delayed, the lockdowns gave way to something like weekends off for the soldiers, and so each weekend for several weeks the kids and I packed up the van to travel the 280 miles to Aberdeen, Md., where the 203rd was stationed. Each trip was potentially “the last time we might see Mommy for a while,” and we treated those weekends with all due reverence. We also spent hundreds of dollars in hotel and travel costs over five such weekends.
Recently there have been reports that soldiers have had to purchase equipment and supplies with their own money, and our family has been no different. We “supported the troops” with the purchase of medical supplies she would need to do her job as a medic, and more mundane items she would need in Iraq, such as a foot locker, a laundry tub, mosquito netting and batteries for flashlights, which the Army didn’t provide.
Finally, in mid-April, we did spend our last tearful weekend, and then Beth left for Kuwait and Iraq. The most striking thing about the next few months was the fact that virtually the whole battalion spent all of May and early June in Tallil, near Nasiriyah, “without vehicles, gear, tents, or computers and equipment,” as she wrote to me. The people had been sent by plane, the equipment by boat. “I can’t understand why we’d have everyone move to Iraq and not be able to do any work.”
Beth and I each fell into a deep depression. I went into therapy; she tried to immerse herself in her work. It is often said that soldiers complain about everything and that you shouldn’t make much of it. In a letter dated July 7, she wrote, “the country [Iraq] has a way of making you feel raped and lost.” As a woman, she doesn’t use the word “rape” lightly. The letter was so bad she didn’t send it at the time, because she didn’t want to worry me. I never received another letter from her, even though she had written once a week or so before that…
It is said that the mood of the soldier depends on the mood of the family at home, but the reverse is true as well. The thought of my wife in a country like Iraq was incredibly hard when I thought it was necessary to defend the country from mushroom clouds over New York.
But in the intervening months, I rarely heard from her, though I knew of her depression. It began to look as if the war was more of a bodybuilding flex designed to satisfy the imperial foreign policy cravings of the hawks in the administration, and, well, that gave the whole thing a different sensation.

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Come See Howard Dean Rally For Health Care Worker’s Rights In San Francisco This Wednesday

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See you there!
Here’s the announcement I received via email:

RALLY WITH HOWARD DEAN AND HEALTH CARE WORKERS IN SAN FRANCISCO
When: Wednesday, Oct. 29, 4-5 PM Where: Lafayette Park and volunteer meeting point will be Clay & Laguna Streets…
California Pacific Medical Center’s Pacific Campus, Buchanan at Clay, San Francisco
Before Howard Dean attends a fundraiser in downtown Oakland on October 29, you can catch him at a FREE OUTDOOR RALLY in San Francisco, in support of health care workers. I understand that the street will be blocked off, and Governor Dean will address at least 1,000 health care workers from the flatbed of a pickup truck. THIS IS AN OPEN RALLY, so it would be great if instead of 1,000 people, we doubled or tripled or even quadrupled the crowd!! This is your opportunity to show how strong our support is for Howard Dean. So tell your boss that you had bad sushi at lunch, and BART into the city to join us all at the intersection of Buchanan and Clay, in Pacific Heights. Don’t forget to wear your Dean t-shirts, caps and buttons, and carry your Dean for America signs!!
The dedicated health care workers at California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) have been asking management for over four months to hold a fast and fair union election. Workers want a voice so they can improve their jobs and the quality of care for their patients. Instead of listening to the wishes of their employees, CPMC management has delayed and denied employees’ right to organize. CPMC is owned by Sutter Health, the only major hospital corporation in California that has not agreed to refrain from employer interference when workers want to unionize.
For more information, go to www.seiu250.org or call Kevin Robbins at (415) 503-5729.

“Little Movies” From Foo Camp

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These are just a few little clips from Foo Camp.
The first is aptly titled Goofing Off At Foo (Small – 9MB). It’s mainly Paul “Schmoo” Holman shooting me really quick and then, after I grab the camera back, asking me not to film him and my filming him anyway, because it was just too funny. (Yes, I did ask him later if it was okay for me to put this up, because I simply do not post footage that people don’t want me to post.)
The second movie is just of the Tent City (Small – 3 MB) that people had going on in O’Reilly‘s backyard.
This footage was shot on October 12, 2003.
Foo A-Z







Bruce Schneier On Why Computer Profiling Sucks (Ahem. Why It’s Ineffective At Catching Terrorists)

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Security God Bruce Schneier explains why computer profiling as a preventative measure for detecting potential terrorists just doesn’t work. At all.

Terror Profiles By Computers Are Ineffective
By Bruce Schneier for Newsday.

Even those who say that terrorists are likely to be Arab males have it wrong. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was British. Jose Padilla, arrested in Chicago in 2002 as a “dirty bomb” suspect, was a Hispanic- American. The Unabomber had once taught mathematics at Berkeley. Terrorists can be male or female, European, Asian, African or Middle Eastern. Even grandmothers can be tricked into carrying bombs on board. One problem with profiling is that, by singling out one group, it ignores the other groups. Terrorists are a surprisingly diverse group of people.
There’s also the other side of the trade-off: These kinds of “data mining” and profiling systems are expensive. They are expensive financially, and they’re expensive in terms of privacy and liberty. The United States is a great country because people have the freedom to live their lives free from the gaze of government, because people are not deemed suspects for possible future crimes based on extensive surveillance sweeps. We as a people believe profiling is discriminatory and wrong.
I have an idea. Timothy McVeigh and John Allen Muhammad – one of the accused D.C. snipers – both served in the military. I think we need to put all U.S. ex-servicemen on a special watch list, because they obviously could be terrorists. I think we should flag them for “special screening” when they fly and think twice before allowing them to take scuba-diving lessons.
What do you think of my idea? I hope you’re appalled, incensed and angry that I question the honesty and integrity of our military personnel based on the actions of just two people. That’s exactly the right reaction. It’s no different whether I suspect people based on military service, race, ethnicity, reading choices, scuba-diving ability or whether they’re flying one way or round trip. It’s profiling. It doesn’t catch the few bad guys, and it causes undue hardship on the many good guys who are erroneously and repeatedly singled out. Security is always a trade-off, and in this case of “data mining” the trade-off is a lousy one.

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Tom Ammiano Clips From The October 14 Mayoral Debate – Part 4 of 4 – Tom On Allocating Funds To Defend Tenants From Unfair Evictions

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I think Tom Ammiano is the best choice for the next mayor of San Francisco.
I’m providing some clips of him from the debate to give you a better idea about who he is and where he stands on the issues.


This clip is from the Mayoral Debate that aired on KPIX Channel 5 on Tuesday, October 14, 2003.

Tom Ammiano On Allocating Funds To Defend Tenants From Unfair Evictions (Small – 4 MB)
Question from Hank Plante:
Plante: “Supervisor Ammiano. You and I have talked about the fact that you support using public funds for lawyers to defend tenants in some wrongful eviction cases. There was a letter to the editor in the Chronicle this week that says “well, does Ammiano also have a plan to provide lawyers to the landlords who are abused by publicly-funded lawyers?”
Ammiano: “Who wrote that letter? Was that you Hank? You know, Supervisor Yee, some years ago, did introduce legislation that would provide eviction assistance to landlords who felt that they were victimized by tenants and that passed. We all voted for that. The issue of supplying community groups for defense of unjust evictions has precedence in New York, has precedence actually here in San Francisco. So, you know, as long as there’s balance, I don’t see anything wrong with that. And I also think, when we do contract with community groups or non-profits, we do ask them to provide services that ordinarily the city cannot provide. I don’t see a balanced approach being a wrong approach in this case. I do think there are people, landlords, small landlords particularly, you have to distinguish between small landlords and ones like Leona Helmsley, and tenants who do not have the wherewithall to take legal action when they’re facing an unjust eviction. So, I don’t have a problem with that, and I also don’t think that means an either or situation, as the letter writer was advocating.

Tom Ammiano Clips From The October 14 Mayoral Debate – Part 3 of 4 – Tom On Parking vs. Public Transit

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I think Tom Ammiano is the best choice for the next mayor of San Francisco.
I’m providing some clips of him from the debate to give you a better idea about who he is and where he stands on the issues. (Complete transcript available below.)
Below: Tom holding up his Muni Fast Pass


This clip is from the Mayoral Debate that aired on KPIX Channel 5 on Tuesday, October 14, 2003.

Tom Ammiano On Parking vs. Public Transit (Small – 6 MB)
Question from Rachel Gordon:
Gordon: “Supervisor Ammiano. You’ve been a solid supporter of the city’s “Transit First” policy, but there are a lot of people who live in San Francisco, who visit the city, who have stores in the city, that say “There’s just not enough parking.” It’s really a maddening situation for a lot of folks. Number one: Do you think that there’s a parking problem in San Francisco? And if you do, how should that problem be addressed?”
Ammiano: (Holds up his Muni Fast Pass high, and then puts it back in his pocket.)
“I think there is a parking problem in San Francisco, and I think we need to revisit some of the issues. You know, depending on what part of the city you live in, the parking takes on a different complexion. If you’re in a part of the city that is not served by public transit as often as the Downtown area, then you’re gonna rely on parking more. And we need to look at that and try to change that. If you’re in a part of the city that has a lot of public transit, but somehow it’s not reliable enough, or perceived to be not safe enough, then you need to put monies into that. I think it’s also a regional issue among the metropolitan transportation commission, and I really lobbied hard for more money for Muni. Muni has a 730-750,000 ridership. I think it deserves more money from regional bodies. At the same time, we need to look at what might convince people to leave their cars. And that would be alternative transportation, such as high speed rail, which is going to be coming to San Francisco we hope next year. Looking at what we can do in terms of bicycle lanes, alternative ways of getting people to and from, and also, I think the dedicated funding to Muni is starting to show improvements, but I think that more improvement is needed. And when that happens, we may in fact be able to reduce that reliance on whether or not there’s a parking space or not.
Gordon: “Can I ask just a quick follow-up question? Would you support the construction of parking garages or parking lots in neighborhood commercial corridors, if that’s what the residents and the merchants demanded? Like the inner Sunset, or Northbeach, or the Richmond District?”
Ammiano: “It’s not my druthers. But believe me, and you know, if you looked at the whole equation and there wasn’t that kind of reliable public transit. If they wanted some combination of retail, car share in-fill on top of the parking lot with affordable housing or senior housing, it might take the sting out of it for me. But I would rather work primarily on providing alternatives to that. But, obviously, that should be on the table, because I know it is important to people.”