Lee, 81, who plays the wizard Saruman in the trilogy, said he had expected to appear in seven minutes' worth of climactic scenes.
"Of course I am very shocked, that's all I can say," he told ITV1's This Morning on Wednesday.
Lee fans have now started an online petition to restore the scenes.
"As far as I'm concerned, I'm only telling you this because it has been revealed on the internet, someone has talked and it certainly wasn't me," he told the UK TV show.
"If you want to know why you would have to ask the company New Line or director Peter Jackson and his associates because I still don't really know why.
"I can't say any more because I signed a confidentiality agreement and I honoured my word."
Asked if he would attend the première, he said: "No, what's the point? What's the point of going? None at all."
Lee brought an impressive presence to the screen as Saruman, and provided a much more tangible villain than the disembodied Sauron. I hope this revelation proves simply a rumor, or that Lee's scenes are at least partially restored. Peter Jackson has reportedly promised that Lee's scenes will appear in the extended DVD version. Jackson claims Saruman plays little role in Return of the King, which is true enough, but unless they plan to just drop the whole palantir angle, his absence will likely prove puzzling. Of course, much the same occurred in the second film, which refers to elven cloaks and brooches that Galadriel gave the party is a scene cut from the original movie.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, though. Jackson would be wiser to leave in five minutes' worth of establishing material and cut -- gasp! -- five from the battle sequences. Extended, more spectacular battles would be a bigger selling point for the special edition DVDs than "here's all the missing plot points that explain stuff that happens later in the film for no apparent reason."
Economists and politicians giddy about prospects for U.S. economic growth got a dousing of cold water on Thursday from Wal-Mart Stores Inc.(nyse: WMT - news - people), the world's largest company. The retailer -- which taps directly into the psyche of the U.S. consumer -- gave a downbeat economic outlook that contrasted with reams of recent data, and bluntly suggested that many of its shoppers are barely making ends meet.
Customers continue to buy the cheapest items in any given category -- a sign that household budgets remain tight, Lee Scott, Wal-Mart chief executive officer, said on a recorded message. Buyers are "timing their expenditures around the receipt of their paychecks, indicating liquidity issues," Scott said. "I don't think consumer spending is slowing, but I also don't see the strength that many of you in the investment community appear to see," Scott said.
If memory serves me right, the holiday shopping season has provided disappointing returns for several years now. No doubt many retailers are banking on a surge in consumer spending this Xmas. The actual outcome will certainly prove interesting.
*Seemingly madatory disclaimer: No, I don't hope for an economic downturn; quite the opposite. However, I have little faith in Bush's economic policies, and although it's inevitable that the economy would show some reflection of recent stimulus measure, the question is whether prosperity trickles down from Wall Street to Main Street. In short, I want the economy to improve, and dumping Bush is the logical and inevitable first step of such a scenario.
spinsanity exposes gop 'political hate speech' label
Spinsanity has an excellent post describing the latest tactic in the Republican's ongoing campaign to de-legitimize criticism of the President: Labeling criticism "political hate speech."
Over the last two months, the Republican Party has begun a systematic effort to label attacks on President Bush by Democratic presidential candidates as "political hate speech," a new piece of political jargon intended to delegitimize criticism of Bush. It appears this strategy will expanded in the coming months -- a recent memo from Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie urged party officials to adopt the term in their rhetoric.
Like "Enronomics" and "Daschlenomics", "political hate speech" is a carefully crafted term designed to create a hazy, non-logical association between two concepts. In this case, the phrase associates criticism of the president with "hate speech," which generally refers to speech that attacks others on the basis of their race, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation. Of course, some rhetoric directed toward President Bush could fairly be described as hateful (just like any politician), but Republicans have used the term sweepingly to try to delegitimize nearly all criticism of Bush, regardless of its substance. This is a key tactic of political jargon, which often seeks to undermine the legitimacy of criticism by invoking hazy but powerful emotional symbols.
It's understandable for the GOP to be against the Democratic Party. It's reprehensible, though, how much the Republicans seem to be against the small-d democratic process.
Well, it's official: The deal struck between the 9/11 commission and the White House regarding access to vital documents is worse than worthless: It's yeat another in this Adminstration's endless parade of phony activities by which it says one thing and does quite another. The White House will be able to redact documents sought by the commission before it gets even the limited access it accepted the other day.
The commission investigating the Sept. 11 terror attacks said on Thursday that its deal with the White House for access to highly classified Oval Office intelligence reports would let the White House edit the documents before they were released to the commission's representatives.
The agreement, announced on Wednesday, has led to the first public split on the commission. Two Democrats on the 10-member panel say that the commission should have demanded full access to the intelligence summaries, known as the President's Daily Brief, and that the White House should not be allowed to determine what is relevant to the investigation.
An umbrella group of victims' families joined the criticism, saying the terms of the accord should be public.
While spokesmen for panel refused again to provide the terms, citing the sensitivity of the talks with the White House, its executive director acknowledged that the White House would be able to remove information from the reports unrelated to Al Qaeda and to the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
"An entire P.D.B. will have articles about China, South Africa, Venezuela," the executive director, Philip D. Zelikow, said in an interview. "The notion that the commission should want to read P.D.B. articles that have nothing to do with Al Qaeda would be a novel suggestion. The commission has not asked to see the country's most sensitive intelligence information on China or North Korea."
A Democrat on the panel who has criticized the accord, former Representative Timothy J. Roemer of Indiana, said in an interview that he believed that the panel had agreed to terms that would let the White House edit the reports to remove the contexts in which the intelligence was presented and to hide any "smoking guns."
"The President's Daily Brief can run 9 to 12 pages long," Mr. Roemer said. "But under this agreement, the commission will be allowed to see only specific articles or paragraphs within the P.D.B.'s. Our members may see only two or three paragraphs out of a nine-page report."
He said the commission should have insisted on access to the full reports, because "you need the context of how the P.D.B. was presented to the president in order to determine whether or not there were smoking guns."
The other Democratic critic on the panel, former Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, has described the agreement as unconscionable.
Administration officials have acknowledged that they are concerned that intelligence reports received by Mr. Bush in the weeks before 9/11 might be construed to suggest that the White House failed to respond to evidence suggesting that Al Qaeda was planning a catastrophic attack. The White House acknowledged last year in response to news reports that a copy of the Daily Brief in August 2001 noted that Al Qaeda might use hijacked planes in an attack.
That admission, of course, confirmed that the Administration misled the nation when it claimed that the attacks came without warning. The new line was, no specific warning, meaning that the hijackers were rude enough not to send the cops engraved invitations. That admission alone was confirmation of the Administration's astonishing incompetence. The Bush administration has also remained steadfastly silent about what actions, if any, it took in response to the warnings it admits it received. Bush has so far managed to avoid careful scrutiny of what he knew and when he knew it, and his actions reveal beyond dispute that he wants to keep it so.
So you have the Administration working to stymie its own official investigative body charged with ensuring that we don't, as a nation, repeat the mistakes that led to 9/11. And rumors abound that Bush is contemplating a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq in time for the election regardless of the current situation. And the invasion of Iraq, of course, inflamed Muslims, strained vital relations with allies, and stretched the US budget and military to the point where we now lack the ability to respond adequately to genuine threats, let alone the flexibility to take the initiative ourselves. Tell me again how Bush is supposed to be "serious" about national defense?
Yes, I know there are security concerns, but there should also be security concerns regarding how the administration let the 9/11 attacks happen. The only way anyone can understand for sure what happened is if the investigators are allowed to know what the decision-makeers knew prior to and on that day. Otherwise, they're just making guesses in the dark, and that isn't going to do a whole lot to protect the country in the long run.
The study, appearing this week in the journal Science, found that baboon mothers who formed networks of female friends were about a third more successful at raising their young than were females who spent more time alone or isolated.
"We don't know how sociability helps females, but we do know that social females do better at raising their young," said Susan C. Alberts, a Duke University researcher and co-author of the study. "It suggests that social bonds are an important part of being primates."
Joan B. Silk, a UCLA professor and first author of the study, said the researchers analyzed how 108 females in wild groups of baboons in Kenya spent their time and how this might affect their motherhood.
The baboons socialize by staying close together, grooming each other's fur and forming tight coalitions against outside threats, either from predators or from other bands of baboons. All of this helps build a tight relationship network among the social females.
"They are spending a lot of time and a lot trouble in maintaining their social contacts," Silk said of the female baboons. "They spend 10 percent of their day grooming others and that is a big chunk of time for animals living in the wild."
But it pays off in reproductive success, she said.
"The most sociable females are about one third more likely to rear their infants successfully to one year than were the least sociable females," said Silk.
Most deaths among young baboons occur during the first year, so if an infant reached that birthday the researchers counted it as a reproduction success.
From my own parenting experience, I have no doubt that strong social networks help human beings too, although not usually in terms of sitting around grooming one another.
Here's some extremely cool news: IBM has adapted technology it developed for making chips for next-generation game consoles to build a supercomputer the size of a TV set.
IBM said the supercomputer, which can perform two trillion calculations per second, is a small-scale prototype of the Blue Gene/L supercomputer that it is building for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
The computer made it onto the Top 500 supercomputer list, which is compiled by a member of the University of Tennessee's computer science department.
IBM vice president of technology and strategy Irving Wladawsky-Berger said that the supercomputer used 1,000 microprocessors that are based on PowerPC microchip technology. The PowerPC chip is currently used in Apple Computer Inc. computers.
It is also the technology that will be the foundation of the next generation of gaming consoles from Nintendo Co. and Sony Corp, which IBM is working on, he said.
He said the chips were less expensive and consumed less power than traditional microprocessors, making it possible to pack the same amount of computing power into a smaller space. Producing the chips in volume for gaming will help offset the costs of building supercomputers, he said.
Video and computer games have long pushed the limits of available technology to cram as much content into available processor power as possible. The lucrative market for computer and video games also fueled demand for more processor power. It's extremely cool to see the computing giant IBM now adapting technology developed for video games to mega-computing, instead of the other way 'round.
Traffic has understandably slacked off since October's record-setting pace, so I haven't been paying much attention to the hit counter. As such, I missed it when the counter passed 51,000 sometime late Tuesday or Wednesday. Thanks for visiting!
The recent string of high-profile attacks on U.S. and allied forces in Iraq has appeared to be so methodical and well crafted that some top U.S. commanders now fear this may be the war Saddam Hussein and his generals planned all along.
Knowing from the 1991 Persian Gulf War that they could not take on the U.S. military with conventional forces, these officers believe, the Baath Party government cached weapons before the Americans invaded this spring and planned to employ guerrilla tactics.
"I believe Saddam Hussein always intended to fight an insurgency should Iraq fall," said Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division and the man responsible for combat operations in the lower Sunni Triangle, the most unstable part of Iraq. "That's why you see so many of these arms caches out there in significant numbers all over the country. They were planning to go ahead and fight an insurgency, should Iraq fall."
In an interview Wednesday at his headquarters northwest of the capital, Swannack said the speed of the fall of Baghdad in April probably caught Hussein and his followers by surprise and prevented them from launching the insurgence for a few months. That would explain why anti-U.S. violence dropped off noticeably in July and early August but then began to trend upward.
Not everyone in Iraq agrees with that theory. An alternative view is that the current resistance was not planned in advance; rather, Hussein loyalists were in disarray after the invasion and took several months to develop a response. In either case, the insurgents clearly gathered intelligence during that time on the vulnerabilities of the U.S. occupation force.
Swannack said there is no evidence that Hussein is orchestrating the attacks. "He has to move so much that he can't do the day-to-day operational planning or direction and resourcing of the effort," he said.
For what it's worth, I doubt Saddam is really running the show. I think for him to do so would be far too risky. Here's what I said in the comment thread to CalPundit's post on the matter, quoting an earlier comment:
Even if Saddam is trying to direct the insurgency, what real effect he could he have? Could he have any effective communication? Could all channels of command have been kept from us? I doubt it.
IMO, Timothy nails it. Communication intercepts are one of our most vital intelligence tools, and proved essential in snaring several prominent al Qaeda figures. If memory serves me right, bin Laden has gone from using satellite phone to using only trusted runners to relay communications, which, of course, hampers his ability to run the show.
If Saddam were running the show, he'd also run a *huge* risk of detection and capture or killing. I strongly doubt that he could maintain a large enough network of runners -- and besides, if the population is unsympathetic, the capture of one could once again blow the whole thing wide open.
Then again, we nabbed his two sons thanks to an informant, not a comm intercept, if accounts are accurate. And they presumably would have played a large role inthe resistance, which hasn't decreased as predicted at the time, but just the opposite.
I don't doubt Saddam had contingency plans for resisting American troops -- disbanding an army that couldn't fight the US into guerilla bands that could is straight out of Sun Tsu -- but I don't think it matters if he's running the resistance or not. Perhaps he is in charge of part of it, but I doubt that's the whole story. And I'm skeptical that he could run a nationwide network of guerillas without us being able to tumble his location.
On the other hand, it's important to remember that war skeptics such as myself were highly doubtful that the US could handle a nigh-unilateral occupation of Iraq without facing a stiff and intractable guerilla resistance. And it's worth remembering that the prevailing opinion in Colin Powell's Pentagon agreed with that assessment. It's beyond belief that this Administration eschewed realistic assessment and disdained planning in favor of the neocons' hopeful optimism. The current situation should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, and the fact that events occurred exactly as predicted a decade ago is indictment of Bush's deadly incomeptence.
