...with the news that Renault F1 will face a FIA council meeting in mid-December. The issue that they have been investigated over concerns the appearance of engineering drawings and other information about the 2007 McLaren, brought to the team by a new employee who joined from McLaren in September 2006.
This latest incident is probably nothing new in F1 circles. Design and engineering personnel switch teams all the time. The senior ones have to serve "gardening leave" before they can join a rival team, in an effort by their former employers to limit the value of the intellectual property knowledge that they may possess.
In this case, the information revealed thus far suggests that the closest parallel to recent incidents is not the recent McLaren case where an employee of that team was found to be in possession of Ferrari design data, but instead the closest parallel is the appearance of Ferrari design data inside the Toyota F1 team in 2003, brought to the team by two ex-Ferrari engineers. That year, the Toyota TF103 bore a striking resemblance to the previous year's Ferrari F2002 (see this split picture).
Damon Hill is right when he stated that these types of incidents are proving dangerous for the FIA. McLaren was fined $100m and stripped of all of it's Constructor points in 2007 for it's part in the appearance of Ferrari IP inside the team. If the FIA does not levy a significant penalty on Renault, elaborate semantic arguments about the differences in the cases may well fall on deaf ears, as the media and motor racing fans conclude that the FIA cannot impartially administer its own rules.
The cynic in me believes that Renault will escape with little more than a slap on the wrist, since Renault currently supplies Red Bull Racing with engines. If the FIA tries to come down hard on Renault, the company may withdraw from F1 again, just as it did in the mid-80's and the mid-90's. This would (at the least) remove engine supplies for 4 cars instantly. (McLaren's leverage over the FIA was reduced at the time of their WMSC hearing because of the apparent collapse of the deal that would have seen ProDrive entering F1 in 2008 using McLaren chassis and Mercedes engines). The only manufacturer that would be prepared to to take up the slack would be Ferrari, since it needs all of the revenue that it can get from F1. Whether the FIA would be prepared to have Ferrari providing engines for 8 cars (Ferrari, Toro Rosso, Force India, and possibly Red Bull) is an interesting question, given that it would give Ferrari a lot more leverage than it already has inside F1. However, there is as much chance of Mercedes stepping in as there is of the Earth reversing its rotational direction. BMW, Toyota and Honda could step in, and BMW is the only other supplier without an additional customer engine team. However, BMW has shown no signs of being interested in additional engine supply deals in the past, and Toyota and Honda have one customer team each already.
Whichever way you look at it, this latest investigation by the FIA, of an incident that has probably occurred dozens of times within F1 in recent memory, is not going to do the sport's image any good at all. The peeved reaction of the FIA to Damon Hill's comments is a give-away. They know that Damon is right about the image fall-out.
The original Toyota IP theft incident was handled largely through the court system in Germany, and by the willingness of Toyota to get some senior managers to fall on their swords in true Japanese style. The FIA was also able to (vaguely plausibly) claim that it was not involved because it was not asked to become involved.
In the case of Renault, despite the fact that the 2007 Renault clearly was nowhere near the equal of the 2007 McLaren (thus tending to confirm the view that the advantage of the McLaren data was minimal at best), Renault's possession of the IP data appeared to have become known to McLaren at the time that they were summoned to attend their special WCMS hearing in September. Given the draconian punishment meted out to McLaren following the second hearing, it was odds-on that McLaren would press the point of the Renault IP possession, if only to put the FIA in an awkward position. Renault has already admitted that it had possession of the data from the time that it recruited an engineer from McLaren in September 2006, so superficially the hearing should merely be concerning itself with what punishment is appropriate.
Whatever the outcome of the Renault investigation, another likely side-effect that the 2007 driver market is now stalled. If there is any doubt about Renault's participation in Formula 1 in 2008, any driver deals in that area will be suspended until the FIA hearings have concluded. This may result in Fernando Alonso being in limbo for a while, or it may result in him agreeing to join Toyota, which is the only team that can afford him and which has a vacancy, following their decision to axe Ralf Schumacher. Toyota may be about to attempt to sign Alonso and build the team around him. The only problem with that approach is that they fired their most capable technical leader 18 months ago (Mike Gascoyne) and the car has not been consistently competitive since.
There is a good reason why this is called the Silly Season...

Link: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/11/09/filibuster/index.html

..continues to be displayed on an almost daily basis, as this article from Glenn Greenwald makes clear. The most amazing part of this is that 4 Democratic Party candidates who had announced that they opposed Michael Mukasey's nomination were absent from the final vote.
Where do I begin? Leadership 101 folks, if you talk the talk you had better be prepared to walk the walk also. Talk about a violation of fundamental principles of leadership...sheesh.
Right now, voting for a third party candidate looks more and more attractive. The Democratic Party had better wise up quick, or they may find themselves facing a Ralph Nader situation all over again. This is not an idle joke. I would not give a cent to any centrally-managed Democratic Party initiative right now. The party leadership seems to be in the grip of triangulating apologists who quite clearly do not believe in holding the current administration accountable for much of anything. This shows to me that they do not understand the meaning of the word "accountability", and I am not prepared to vote for people who do not believe in the concept of accountability. Lack of accountability helped to get the US into its current fiscal and imperial mess. This view is one that is shared by most of my friends and acquaintances. The Democratic Party needs to realize that you do not win elections by pissing off and alienating your natural base of support i.e, folks like me.
I am more and more convinced that BushCo must have tapes or photos or something on the Democratic Party leadership. There is not much else that can explain the craven, spineless kow-towing to the wishes of an intellectual and ethically bankrupt administration that we are seeing right now.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tibbets

Paul W. Tibbets, the commander of the 509th Composite Group, and the commander of the Enola Gay, which dropped the world's first atomic bomb on a wartime target, has just passed away at the ripe old age of 92.
As one might expect from a man who commanded a bomb-drop that changed many of the previously-accepted realities of war, Tibbets, during his lifetime, became something of a lightning-rod for controversy. He consistently defended his role in the ending of World War II, claimed he had no real regrets over the dropping of the bomb, and even (in what I consider to be a tasteless lapse of judgement) participated in a re-enactment of the Hiroshima bomb drop in 1976, complete with a fake mushroom cloud, which caused diplomatic protests from Japan.
However, history also shows that Tibbets was a talented airman possessing all of the best qualities required in wartime; he was focussed, tenacious and demanding, and personally assembled the 509th and honed it into a top-flight operational bombing unit.
In life, when countries are at war, the demands on people are fundamentally different than the demands of the subsequent peace. Peacetime usually leads to sober reflection and reasoned analysis, whereas in wartime one's priority often consists of simply staying alive. It is generally accepted that the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, while immensely costly in terms of human lives in the two target cities, probably saved a lot of lives on both sides of the conflict, by removing the need for the USA to invade the Japanese mainland, which was looking like being an immensely costly undertaking in terms of human life. The Japanese defenders of Iwo Jima had already shown that they were prepared to resist to the last man for months, even in the face of hopeless odds, and the US armed forces were convinced after watching that and other incidents of Japanese resistance (such as the Kamikaze aircraft raids on ships) that a lot of US lives were going to be lost if the USA had to invade the Japanese mainland. In that respect, the use of the atomic bomb was a pragmatic calculation to save US (and Japanese) lives.
Another factor that also comes into play is the reality that having played a lead role in an event that is one of the most important world history events at the age of only 30, Tibbets' life situation was very similar to that of the top-flight sportsman who has achieved all of his or her sporting goals. What next? How do you top that? After his role in World War II, the rest of Tibbets' life must have seemed somewhat anti-climactic, even without considering all of the post-war analysis of what was in reality a very disturbing event; the confirmation that homo sapiens was perfectly capable of destroying the planet.
Fortunately, but also unfortunately, Tibbets lived the rest of his life in conditions of (relative) world peace, where his actions could be analyzed ad nauseam without the distorting lens of day-to-day imperatives (like staying alive) faced by members of the armed forces and civilians. Like many combat veterans, Tibbets probably came to see this analysis process as an exercise in what military folk call "20:20 hindsight", and he certainly seemed to be fairly contemptuous of what he saw as attempts at historical revisionism. He was particularly incensed at the decision to scale back a proposed Smithsonian exhibit featuring Enola Gay after protests about the exhibit left the Smithsonian caught between a rock and a hard place.
As a strong leader of men and women in wartime, Paul Tibbets found out the hard way that strong leadership also makes you a lighting rod for post-hoc analysis and criticism. He was a great military leader, the right man given the right job at the right time. However, like many wartime leaders, he was then forced (as he saw it) to constantly defend himself after the fact in peacetime. His situation was remarkably similar to that of Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, who was the Commander-In-Chief of RAF Bomber Command at the time of the raids on Dresden that ignited a lethal firestorm. Harris was so dismayed by post-war criticism of the Dresden bombings that he actually left the UK for a while and went to live in South Africa.
Like many veterans, whenever he sensed criticism, Tibbets retreated behind a wall of defiant certitude, which was unfortunate, but emotionally understandable. More understanding on both sides might have led to the peacetime Paul Tibbets being less of an unapologetic curmudgeon, and post-war criticism of his role could have become more understanding and less harshly judgemental.

Link: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/11/1/194535/310

...from the blogger Megaphone of Destiny on what not to do if you are a closeted gay Republican...in the words of Derek and Clive..."laugh? we nearly shat..."

Link: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/120/motorhead-messiah.html

This article is interesting on several levels, although it makes some pretty big claims. However, the basic thesis that the "Big 3" auto makers in the USA are (for want of a better phrase) asleep at the wheel, rings true based on what I see them offering the public, and also what I saw happen to the UK auto makers over a 20 year period beginning in the 1970s'.
In the UK, the local auto makers turned out boring cars which were overpriced and often unreliable. Their whole attitude was based on the idea that they were doing you a favour by selling you a vehicle.
Bit by bit their market share shrank, as the public voted with their wallets and bought vehicles made by foreign manufacturers. The UK manufacturers spent many years proclaiming sniffily that there was nothing wrong with their products, along with telling us that we should "buy British", as if that was some sort of talisman that would ward off evil spirits. They eventually realized that Denial is not a river in Egypt, but by then their head-in-the-sand attitude had caused the virtual extinction of the volume car manufacturing sector in the UK.
I forsee a similar fate for Ford, GM and Chrysler unless they climb out of their SUV and truck hole and completely re-work their whole engineering and design approaches.
I also believe that the current state of the Big 3 auto makers is an excellent example of what happens when governments do not regulate business properly. By exempting light trucks from the 1978 automobile fuel economy regulations, the administration of President Carter gave the US auto makers the capability to end-run the environmental intent of the new regulations, which they duly did. As a result, they invested limited money in R&D for more fuel-efficient cars, and instead pandered to the "bigger is better" mindset with model ranges that included trucks half the size of 18 wheelers, and SUVs only marginally smaller than a house. This was all well and good with gasoline at $1.00 a gallon, but economically unsustainable with gasoline hovering around $3.00 a gallon.
To be fair to the auto makers, they were reflecting the buying decisions of the American public for a long time. However, those buying imperatives are now shifting towards fuel-efficiency, but the Big 3 are not moving to address those new imperatives. Every time I sit down to watch TV, I am bombarded with adverts trying to sell me vehicles the size of a small house. My usually response is "WTF"? If I want a house I will go visit a realtor.

Link: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/index.html

An interesting series of events has unfolded as part of an ongoing series of exchanges between Glenn Creenwald and a military spokesperson for Gen. Petraeus. The full details are only obtainable by reading the postings in Salon, but it is worth a read, if only because it is clear that reading comprehension is not a strength of some war supporters.

Controversy followed the Patriots’ 52-7 demolition of the Redskins on Sunday. The Patriots continued to score deep into the fourth quarter (some of the starters, including Tom Brady, had been pulled from the field, but a number were still playing right until the end of the game). A number of commentators, including Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk and Gregg Easterbrook of ESPN, wrote that the decision to keep scoring showed poor judgement on behalf of the Patriots.
Easterbrook’s aversion to running up the score is a well-known matter of record; his oft-expressed view is that the Football Gods will punish teams that run up the score on already-beaten opponents. Here is what he had to say about the game in his latest Tuesday Morning Quarterback column on ESPN:

In other football news, man, the Patriots play well -- and, man, are they bad sports. With 13 minutes remaining, New England led Washington 38-0 -- 13 points more than the margin of the greatest fourth-quarter comeback in NFL history -- yet Tom Brady was still on the field, still in the shotgun and still throwing deep. When it was 52-0, most New England defensive starters were still on the field, desperately trying to prevent a Redskins consolation touchdown. In a nationally televised game, Bill Belichick went out of his way to display bad sportsmanship; it was especially coarse that Belichick sought to humiliate Hall of Fame coach Joe Gibbs, a mild-mannered, dignified man who always treats others respectfully. See more on the Patriots' good play plus bad sportsmanship below. For now, it's enough to say that other teams could have run up the score Sunday but instead showed dignity. When Indianapolis took a 31-7 lead at the beginning of the fourth quarter at Carolina, Peyton Manning and most of the Colts' starters sat down. Tony Dungy made no attempt to run up the score. When New Orleans went ahead 31-3 early in the fourth quarter against San Francisco, Drew Brees and most of the Saints' starters sat down.

The concept of “running up the score” exposes the fundamental dichotomy that exists at the heart of all professional sports between the leaders of successful teams and spectators. The leaders of teams see the situation through the “win or lose”, “compete at all times” lens. To them, the concept of “running up the score” is an alien idea – why not score? If you don’t score enough, the opposition might come back and win. To spectators, on the other hand, there is a discernible difference between beating an opponent and humiliating them. While a score of 78-0 or something similar might get you in the record books, lower-level teams soon learn that it also creates a lot of ill-will that can last for years. Humiliating opponents strips away the sporting veneer and starts to look to many people like macho bullying. Most humans do not want to be known as macho jerks; thus, at the amateur level, running up the score is generally regarded as a Bad Thing.
The dichotomy extends to other forms of sport. In 2002, there was uproar after Ferrari ordered Rubens Barrichello to move over on the last lap of the Austrian Grand Prix to let his team-mate Michael Schumacher win the race. The post-race ceremonies were rendered meaningless, since the spectators knew that without the team orders, Barrichello would have been on the top step of the podium. Michael Schumacher knew this and even pulled Barrichello up to the top step, but boos and catcalls were the predominant reaction to what the viewing public saw as a “fixed” result.
The most interesting aspect of the affair was the reaction of Jean Todt of Ferrari, who seemed genuinely unable to understand the negative reaction. To him, the decision to move Schumacher to the front was a pragmatic professional duty, in order to safeguard the championship points situation. He failed to understand that to most spectators, the decision looked like a negation of the fundamental principles of sporting competition. If Rubens Barrichello was faster than Michael Schumacher, then why should he not be allowed to finish first? Todt eventually realized that the decision was not the smartest thing that Ferrari could have done, but it took a storm of public excoriation to force him out of his “bubble”.
This bubble is the same "bubble" that many sportsmen live in when they assert (incorrectly) that the laws of the land do not apply to the field of play for a contact sport (or, as a coach memorably defined it, a "collision sport" like the NFL).
Which is where we come back to the NFL. For sure, Bill Belichick and the Patriots see the final score as nothing special. They will probably argue that they showed respect to the Redskins when they pulled some starters, but that they do expect backups to be able to score (otherwise why are they on the roster?). They would also point out that with a game next weekend against the Indianapolis Colts, the last thing that any NFL team should do is relax. Beyond that, any discussion with them will most likely run headlong into the professional sportsman – spectator dichotomy that I discussed above.
We need to look beyond this single game for the underlying issue behind the firestorm. The real underlying issue here is not really the score, it is what (for want of a better term) I will call the Bill Belichick Factor. Belichick is the public face of the Patriots most of the time, by virtue of the tight control he exerts over communications between the coaching staff and the media. He long ago adopted the Bill Parcells policy of not allowing his assistant coaches to speak to the media during the season. He himself, like Bill Parcells, always seems to regard interviews and press conferences as about as exciting as a long trip to the dentist. Unlike Parcells, who would deploy ridicule, sarcasm, and occasionally sail into verbal battle with questioners when he did not care for the line of questioning, Belichick is dour, usually devoid of any discernible sense of humour, and prone to respond to questions using empty clichés (if I hear “it is what it is” again in one of his press conference replies, I will scream. I promise). Somewhere beneath the cypher-like exterior, there is a human being, but we are not likely to see that anytime soon.
The 52-7 score will become another sin to be hung around Belichick’s neck, which he will not care about in the short-term, especially if the Patriots beat the Colts and go on to win the SuperBowl. However, in his old age, Belichick might find himself reflecting on the verdict of him in the history books, which will probably say something like “great coach, but a bit of a horse’s ass”. By that time it will be too late for him to do much about that verdict, although humility can be acquired even late in life. The decision as to whether to be a cypher or a human being is one that he does have some control over, which is why I hope that somebody can explain to him that it ought to be possible for him to defend the events of Sunday without sounding either like a miserable old crone, or somebody who fails to appreciate that for the majority of spectators, winning by an absurd margin is not a 24x7 occupation.

I have been spending more time in North-West New Mexico this year...I have friends in Farmington and Boulder UT, and a flying buddy of mine lives in Aztec. I am now looking into buying a land parcel in Aztec as a possible site for my sustainable dwelling. Being less than half a mile from an airport would be a terrible place to live, but somebody has to live there...

Link: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/10/19/1717/5208

From a commenter in this diary at Dailkos:

I had to go get my standard bloodwork done this morning. While sitting in the doctor's office waiting to go in to see the lab tech, I realized that CNN's business model probably isn't to deliver news in the US, it's to be background noise in offices, gyms, hotel lobbies, etc. Thus, instead of news, you get schlock.

This hits the nail on the head for me. Channels like Fox News and CNN are no longer operating as foreground information dissemination channels. They instead provide background noise or visuals, which, by definition, means that they have to be a close approximation to a content-free zone. My reaction to these channels is similar to my reaction to muzak; they annoy the hell out of me, and sometimes I wish that I could miraculously acquire a firearm on the spot and engage in some vandalism.
As long as a significant number of Americans think that they are informed because they get their knowledge of the world from these types of media outlets, there is little prospect of a more informed electorate voting in more informed and better-equipped politicians.

Link: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/9/23/201235/300

..concerning the shambles of the current Congress.