May 2003 Archives

I was talking to some people over the various revelations about WMD and such over the past two days, and it's interesting to hear their points of view. They are intelligent and reasonably well informed. But what was interesting is that they really didn't seem to care all that much. Several were of the opinion that we're moving into a different age. Given the state of communications, everyone all over the world - regardless of their wealth - can see how the upper crust lives. So you have a vast population living pretty much in poverty or worse, and a small percentage living the high life. It used to be that the unlucky could live in blissful ignorance of how the lucky few lived. This is no longer the case. And it was the opinion of several of my acquaintances that they weren't just going to sit back and do nothing about it. Resources - especially water - are getting scarcer and scarcer and that's going to lead inevitably to war.

So it was more resignation to the inevitableness of the whole thing. It mattered little what the actual reasons for the war were. It is clearly going to be a matter of us or them.

A few also suggested that perhaps a pandemic could arise which could take care of the situation for us.

And so it goes. People seem to be pretty pessimistic about the whole future - at least from the small sample I've taken. It's all going to hell in a hand basket and it's just going to get worse. Wars are inevitable, and they've just begun.

Depressing, ain't it?

Well, it would appear that there are some questions regarding the mobile bio weapons labs. I was hoping that some independent experts would start to pipe in once the information about them became publicly available. From Slate, we learn there's quite a few questions from those who should know.

One biologist, looking at CIA-released photographs of a trailer, noted that the pipes feeding into the chamber appear to have threaded or bolt-flange joints, which he says would cause leaks—both from the inside and to the outside. The former might contaminate the bioproduction, the latter might kill the bioworkers. Another biologist said he would like to know whether the trailer has a thermal-control meter that could keep the chamber to within one or two degrees of body temperature; if there is such a meter, the trailer might have been used to grow toxins; if there isn't, it couldn't possibly have been.

Then there's the alleged meeting between Colin Powell and Tony Snow, the transcript of which has been leaked. If this turns out to be true, it'll be a very interesting piece of the puzzle. But I have to ask. If this is the case, then why was Powell going along with the charade? Oh well. Only he knows the answer to that one. One thing I think we can be sure of, though, is that what all this really amounts to will be grist for the NeoCon pummeling of Powell. It'll just be portrayed as a failure of character on Powell's part, proving how stupid they were to listen to the man. After all, if they didn't go the UN route in the first place, they would have been able to go to war far earlier and would have caught Saddam red-handed with the WMD.

But I have to wonder about this argument. The idea is that somehow the war was so quick that it caught Saddam by surprise. Yet he seemed to have more than enough time to either get the WMD out of the country and/or destroy them and/or hide them. I just can't make that one make sense at all. Given that we can pretty much diagnose skin conditions from orbit and we have had constant surveillance of the country with "Bob" only knows what kind of technology, it would only mean that our intelligence agencies are complete morons for letting these actions slip by. But then, blaming the intelligence agencies seems to be pretty much standard operating procedure these days.

And then there is Tony Blair's declaration that Iraq weapons secrets will be publicized. What's interesting about this is the way the story has been taken up by the Right wing and other war supporters. From reading the comments around the web about the article, they are just assuming that Blair and Bush already have a bunch of secret evidence and they're just waiting for the right moment to spring it on the world. The theory is that Bush is letting everyone - i.e. the Democrats - take as much rope as they want and then he's going to spring the trap, tighten the noose around them and let them hang themselves. But this is really a lot of hopeful wishing I think. Blair didn't actually say that he had secret evidence, rather that they were going to compile evidence over the next few months and then make it public.

"Over the coming weeks and months we will assemble this evidence and then we will give it to people," he said. "I have no doubt whatever that the evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction will be there."

In any event, it'll be darn interesting to see what the Sunday talk shows reveal. I wonder if any of the Administration will be trotted out to do damage control. Seeing as how theres all this major activity going on next week - G8 summit, middle east summit, etc. - I don't think anyone should really have the time available to appear on them. Regardless, it will be fun to see how all this is spun - on both sides.

Given that a significant portion of the US citizenry believes that we've already found WMD, it's interesting that they still care about finding them. After all, it seems that the vast majority of Americans believe Saddam moved the WMD into another country... Seems like they've got everything in hand, doesn't it?

And I know the point has been made before, but it's it damning proof that our media has completely failed in it's mission if there is a huge population of Americans that believe facts that either haven't been proved, or have been proven false. Liberal or not, the media obviously isn't doing their job to inform. But then, their job isn't to inform, it's to entertain. And whatever the market wants, the market gets.

Yi.

Reality has completely left the building.

Bush: 'We Found' Banned Weapons

"You remember when [Secretary of State] Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons," Bush said in an interview before leaving today on a seven-day trip to Europe and the Middle East. "They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two.

"And we'll find more weapons as time goes on," Bush said. "But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them."

Started reading Darwin's Cathedral. The evolution of the group is something I've been fascinated ever since I read Dawkin's The Selfish Gene. Growing up where and when and with whom I did, libertarian was pretty much the natural outcome for a young outcast who endured years of daily interaction in a fundamentalist Christian school. Individualism is just the most statistically likely outcome. Well, that or a life of crime. Turns out that fundamentalist Christian schools are also a dumping ground for problem children who's parents are at their wits end trying desperately to get their future felon to behave. Me, having excellent parents despite the Christian school thing, I took the road of the nerd rather than the hoodlum.

In any event, The Selfish Gene was always a favorite in the libertarian justification litany. See? Our genes are this way. It's the natural order of life. When everyone looks out for themselves, everything just works out. The unseen hand will guide us all into free market utopia.

I never really bought into all that jazz, as something always seemed wrong with it. I remember when the Ayn Rand meme went through the group of people I hung around with during college. I picked up a copy of Atlas Shrugged and I was immediately struck by something that has always seemed to be akin to cognitive dissonance. To me, the bad characters were the one's who were really selfish. Not the great individualists who were the heroes. I mean, I understood the basic idea of the philosophy, but it always struck me as a bit Orwellian to have the twisted logic of "those who say they are selfless are really selfish and those who are really selfish are really selfless". It just made no sense to me. The problem, of course, is caused by the use of the world "Selfish" as a symbol for two very different concepts. But they insist on worshiping the selfish thing, and it creates no end of confusion and heated debate. Why on earth they just didn't make up another word, or use a word which would make more sense, I can only guess.

In any event, the notion always seemed silly to me, and seemed even sillier when genetics were being used to justify it. Many years later I was listening to an interview with Richard Dawkins on that commie liberal NPR. His book, Unweaving the Rainbow, had just come out and he was making the rounds on the circuits. Naturally, the subject of his previous book came up. I can't remember exactly what he said, but what caught my attention was his explanation of how his book had been misinterpreted. Things evolve in concert with their environment - a cooperation, if you will. And the environment of a gene is really just a whole bunch of other genes. To talk about the evolution of a single gene outside of its environment was just ludicrous.

Which kind of summed up my feelings about libertarianism. Along the way, I picked up a wonderful quote which summarizes it more eloquently with "It's wise to remember that with one insignificant exception, the universe is entirely composed of others".

Anyways, Dawkins was eventually asked about Religion and such in the interview. What he said about it really intrigued me. He said that children will believe anything an adult tells them up to a certain age. This was a good evolutionary trait, as it allowed us to quickly transmit ideas and socially condition the young. However, it also provided a mechanism to propagate completely erroneous belief systems. What happens is that you have adults who believe things and they don't know why they believe them. They just do. Even if it conflicts with everything else they know.

According to this viewpoint, Religion was just a self replicating meme that we can't really unstick unless we have several successive generations purging the meme. And I think there's a lot of people who would agree with this model. It provides a rationalization for those who can't conceive of why people believe the things they do.

But believing in Evolution requires one to come up with an explanation for why things are here. Nature is pretty frugal. Nothing seems to survive long if it doesn't have some use. And one thing that is pretty clear is that Religion has been around since before we started using tools. Organized religion and it's cousins tribalism and nationalism
.......................................
So the book looks to be a good read. Like all things on the edge of our current understanding, there's no doubt that the book is filled with errors and problems. But it should be interesting none-the-less.

Woke up this morning and took out an ad for Atrios, jr on Eschaton. Thought that he/she would appreciate the irony. I was wrong. Oh well. I've always been pathetically lousy at these kind of games. Pretty much any kind of game, really. Likely something to do with everyone in my family being ultracompetive. In any event, I converted that ad to point to the Disinformation web site. Converted mine to one for the Center for Cooperative Research - a great site, by the way.

No doubt he/she will pummel and gloat, but that's the breaks. The younger generation is obviously way too much for an old tired dog like me.

Rock on, jr.

The Missing Piece in the 2002-03 Supreme Court Term:
The Forgotten Fourth Amendment, and Why It Will Matter Greatly in the War on Terror

Yi. There is no end to this bad news. It's like the sword of Damocles.

Is it safe? Trifecta

U.S. 'negation' policy in space raises concerns abroad

Beginning next year, NRO will be in charge of the new Offensive Counter-Space program, which will come up with plans to specifically deny the use of near-Earth space to other nations, said Teets.

The program will include two components: the Counter Communication System, designed to disrupt other nations' communication networks from space; and the Counter Surveillance Reconnaissance System, formed to prevent other countries from using advanced intelligence-gathering technology in air or space.

"Negation implies treating allies poorly," Robert Lawson, senior policy adviser for nonproliferation in the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, said at a Toronto conference in late March. "It implies treaty busting."

Hints of such a policy showed up in the Rumsfeld Commission report of January 2001, which warned of a "space Pearl Harbor" if the United States did not dominate low-earth, geosynchronous and polar orbital planes, as well as all launch facilities and ground stations, to exploit space for battlefield advantage.

Again, bait and switch. Get everyone to argue about the idiocy of an ABM system and how it won't make us any safer. The real goal, however, is completely absent from discussion in a clueless media. It's crystal clear that this is their real strategy. Don't worry, our valiant Fourth Estate won't figure it out until it's way, way too late to do anything about it.

What a Tangled Web We Weave

STRATFOR'S MORNING INTELLIGENCE BRIEF U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, in a Vanity Fair interview, said the public justification for the invasion of Iraq was not primarily based on the fear of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Wolfowitz was quoted as saying, "For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on." Of lesser importance but explosive nevertheless was a BBC report that the British had deliberately exaggerated the presence of WMD in Iraq. The two stories, emerging on the same day, inevitably combined to create a shock in the international system. U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld scrambled, later in the day, reasserting in a radio interview the original administration position.

Wolfowitz's admission is an argument that Stratfor has made from the beginning: The United States invaded Iraq for strategic reasons -- to exert power against surrounding Islamic countries -- and used the issue of weapons of mass destruction to build an international coalition. The invasion would have taken place had no weapons of mass destruction existed. Wolfowitz's statement is no surprise to us at all. What is a surprise is that all of this is leaking out now, let alone while the United States is in a confrontation with Iran over the same issue and U.S. President George W. Bush is preparing to visit the Middle East.

Wolfowitz's statement could have been simply a mistake. He has had many hours to deny making the statement but hasn't, leading us to conclude that it is true. It might have been simply a slip, letting the cat out of the bag, but Wolfowitz is not prone to making slips on this order of magnitude. A second explanation is that the administration is grappling with the fact that it has failed to discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and has decided that the best strategy is to simply admit that the war's purpose was strategic, not about weapons of mass destruction. A third reason is that brutal bureaucratic infighting has broken out inside the Bush administration now, centered around the failure to discover WMD. Wolfowitz, feeling pressure over the issue, decided his strongest move was to go public with the truth, putting his critics on the defensive as naïve.

As you can see by the many reasons listed, we really don't have any good theories. The idea of a planned leak is hard to believe. The idea of an accident of this magnitude is equally hard. We guess that leaves us with savage infighting, but this bit of savagery would hurt the administration as a whole and doesn't leave Wolfowitz looking too good either, to say the least.

It always seemed to us that the cover story was not as effective as the real reason, but the administration seemed to believe that the international community and the American public would be more likely to rally around the WMD argument rather than the strategic one. Having given that as the prime answer, the administration found it difficult to switch gears in the middle.

It has always seemed likely to us that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction, even if that was far from the primary reason for invasion. The reason for our view is simply this: If Hussein had no weapons and none under development, why did he behave as he did with chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix? Why not let the scientists leave the country so they could discuss the nonexistence of nuclear weapons. Why not produce records of the destruction of WMD? Why not videotape the destruction process? Hussein was facing a war that he could not win where the public justification was false. Why deny the existence of WMD and then behave in a way that supported the plausibility of the Anglo-American position?

Wolfowitz, in the end, did not say that Iraq didn't have WMD. What he said was that this was not the primary reason for going to war. However, combined with the British leak and the increasingly embarrassing failure to find WMD in Iraq, a serious firestorm is brewing. This will not occur only in U.S. politics, although the Democrats will be all over this. It also will change the tone of the G8 meeting this weekend. Most important, it undermines the credibility of U.S. charges against Iran and, at a time when U.S. forces are facing increased resistance in Iraq, it strengthens the position of the Baathist opposition, who can now portray themselves as the victims of U.S. duplicity.

Wolfowitz's statement strikes us as generally true, although his explanation about withdrawing U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia as the prime goal is woefully insufficient. Why he felt a compulsion to tell the truth is more difficult to understand. Perhaps it is a trial balloon by the administration for explaining the failure to find WMD. If there is no firestorm, it becomes the postwar rationale. If there is a firestorm, Wolfowitz looks for an exciting new career.

Bottom line: In the past 24 hours we have the report from CBS that the attempt to kill Hussein on the first day hit a building without a bunker in it; an intensifying set of claims that the hostage rescue was staged; Wolfowitz's interview; and the BBC report. The administration has started hemorrhaging credibility. It normally controls perception, and it has suddenly lost control. Very odd.

If Colin Powell really is as honorable as we all thought, and he really did just get duped by Rummy's "scraps of intelligence" (combined with his overwhelming sense of duty, as a soldier) then the phrase "brutal bureaucratic infighting" is a woefully adequate understatement. Right after Baghdad fell, the Right descended on Powell like a pack of jackals. Remember Gingrich's comments at the AEI? Remember the DOD pretty much saying that they should be running the State Dept? Well, you can bet your left eyetooth that they do.

And just another thing. The "If Hussein had no weapons and none under development, why did he behave as he did with chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix?" argument is getting pretty lame. There are tons and tons of reasons why. For example, he's just insane and put a higher value on Iraqi honor than he did cooperating with Blix. And then there's the little fact that StratFor themselves puts out "The invasion would have taken place had no weapons of mass destruction existed." So, if you're going to be invaded regardless of whether you have WMD or not, why the hell would you cooperate with the inspectors? It makes perfect sense to continue to drag your heels and be passive aggressive about the entire process. If nothing else, it buys you time and it just might work - after all, it had in the past. I mean, come on guys. You're intelligence analysts. It doesn't take much training at all to come up with Azaelf a dozen reasons why he would be doing this. Grow up.

And then there's the interesting fact that Saddam is still alive. What if Saddam is really just making the US look like fools. He gives all the impressions to this Administration that he has WMD, leading them about like a donkey reaching for the carrot on the stick. He knows the US is going to invade anyways, so he becomes a rope manufacturer. He keeps giving them the rope and even offers to tie the noose. Then when the invasion happens, he slips out to an undisclosed location, knowing that they will find absolutely nothing. Then, when all the shit starts coming down around them, they're credibility is destroyed, and they are left with a huge bag of shit. As StratFor says, "it strengthens the position of the Baathist opposition, who can now portray themselves as the victims of U.S. duplicity." Then, when the US inevitably grows weary of the resulting quagmire, his party can possibly regain control, and then Saddam can return to set up shop again as the mighty victor against the US snake. After all, this is precisely what appears to be happening in Afghanistan, isn't it? You know, with the Taliban regrouping and starting to make inroads back into power? And then there's the reconstituted Al Qaeda phoenix, reborn from the ashes of the last year.

I mean, really. How much are they paying these guys to not have a clue?

Like I said. If everyone thought that we were going to lose face and credibility by not going to war when we had blustered and positioned hundreds of thousands of troops, just think how much damage this pack of jokers has done to the US. Far better to be thought a fool than to do something foolish and remove all doubt.

All I can say is thanks to all you war supporters out there. You've done such a royal job of screwing the pooch that I can hardly believe it.

Am I happy? No frickin' way. We're all going to have to pay for this insanity. All of us. And it's going to cost us a shit load of money, time, and yes, lives.

Thanks.

Iraqi Labs `Proof' of Banned Weapons, Fleischer Says

Keep saying it Ari. Over and over and over. C'mon, I know you can do it.

``What else would those biological trucks have been for?'' Fleischer told reporters in Washington. ``There is now proof positive that he had these biological mobile trucks for the purpose of producing biological weapons.''

Better start another war. Or get the spooks you've been using as a scapegoat lately to plant the WMDs. 'Cause you're making us all look like a bunch of complete dupes.

I dedicate this song to Ari and his pack of Guild Navigators

People Talk by Talking.....
I'm tired of the stories that you always tell
Shakespeare couldn't tell a story that well
You're the largest liar that was ever created
You and Pinnocio are probably related
That's a Lie....Hey, that's me playing harmonica
You're a liar...Yeah, and I wrote this song too
Lie, Lie, Lie, That's a Lie...Really I did, LL Cool Jay was over my house
You're a liar...He heard me humming it. He said "Hey, that sounds good!"
You lie about the things you've lied about
You even lied to your aunt when you went down South
You lied and a bodybuilder kicked your butt
If you was in Egypt, you'd lie to King Tut
That's a Lie...Just one glass of wine with dinner, officer
You're a liar...Ahh, L.A., what a great place
Lie, Lie, Lie, That's a Lie...No mom, I'm not on drugs
You're a liar....Of course I love you
My father said now son never tattle, never lie
But I think he should have followed some of his own advice,
I thought I'd own the world when I turned 21
Well, that's the last line 'cause now the song is done
That's a Lie...Overbudget? Us??!
You're a liar...Hey, we should have lunch!
Lie, Lie, Lie, That's a Lie...It won't hurt, believe me
You're a liar...I won't cum in your mouth
That's a Lie, Lie, Lie, Lie, Lie, Lie, Lie!
Lie, Lie, Lie, Lie, Lie, Lie, Lie!
Lie, Lie, Lie, Lie, Lie, Lie, Lie!
Lie, Lie, Lie, Lie, Lie, Lie, Lie!
That's a Lie.......

Rumsfeld rejects Iraq WMD doubts

Damn that dog pulling the curtain aside. Combined with Wolfie's inopportune revelations and the UK dossier fiasco... well, I think that Toto might actually have pulled the curtain away just enough to really get the Great Oz worried. They're going to start upping the amplitude and the special effects. But it's going to get harder and harder. The Iraqis aren't following the liberation script and are being a major pain in the ass.

Pretty soon now, Perle is going to say something idiotic as well. Then Cheney will have to be unfrozen and trotted out like a CEO on a PR campaign. Wait a minute. Not "like". He is a CEO and every time he speaks it is a PR campaign. I used to work for a company who's CEO I always imagined as Bozo the clown. He'd show up at a client's site and climb up on the table with his big red wig and obscenely large shoes and then start to tap dance. The client would be dumbfounded - just sitting there with their collective jaws dropped on the floor in horror. He'd take this as "I knocked 'em dead - another great sales job" and then come home to torture his employees by regaling us of the successful meeting. Kind of like Cheney. Except he's the stern hobo clown, not Bozo.

Anyways, listen to this

In his latest remarks he says the reason they have not been found up until now is because the government of Saddam Hussein had worked so hard to hide them.

It is not because they are not there he says - the US believed they were there.

But it is cool to see them sweat. Maybe they are far more overloaded than they let on. Rather than engage in schadenfreude, I'll only say that the most terrifying thing of all is if really turns out that these guys are complete jokers who are way out of their league in reality. If they start to fail, then there is a whole lot of shit that is going to go down. Remember everyone saying that we'd severely cripple US credibility and such if we backed down over the war, seeing as we had blustered so much over and moved all those troops n' such? Well, just think how frickin' cool it's going to be when the entire facade that these idiots are basing everything on comes crashing down? Think we were going to lose a lot of face and credibility over not going to war? I can hardly wait...

Gee, we'll have waged a clearly stupid preemptive war, shredded a shit load of international treaties, eviscerated a lot of international alliances, spent a shit load of money, got hundreds of coalition soldiers killed, and to top it off we've inherited our own personal Palestine (or a damn good facsimile). "Bob" knows we have to stay in there and clean up that mess, and only he knows how long that's going to take. After all, this fabulous brain trust that brought us this whole thing doesn't seem to have a plan as to how they're going to rebuild Iraq. These Iraqis aren't following their scripted version of reality, and it appears that Iraqis just don't give a flying fuck what the Great Oz commands. They have the nerve to have their own agenda and that's just not in the plan at all.

Guess what Rummy? You'd better have a shitload of evidence planted that is a heck of a lot better than 3 rusty trailers with fermentation units in them. It's just not going to wash. And you can huff and puff and whine all you want, but unless someone starts seeing something tangible and not just the "scraps" of evidence that convince you and your band of merry men that they had WMD, British political heads are going to start rolling. Yea, the American public could care less, and it's not like you're going to lose the next election here on this issue. But overseas, they're going to start asking a lot of questions. And Tony Blair doesn't seem to have his own Great Oz to warp reality like ours does. They could care less what we all say or think. They have their own politics, and at the end of the day, the US doesn't mean jack when it comes to the British politicians going after each other's throats.

Laugh while you can monkey boys. You may well end up screwing us over far more royally than any commie liberal of your darkest nightmares ever could.

I was pondering the stinky loaf that John Derbyshire squeezed out yesterday. His basic premise is that since public sector workers benefit the most by a bloated government, they should be disenfranchised - i.e., they should not be allowed to vote. So I wondered how Herr Derbyshire's theory would apply to the private sector. After all, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If your a stock holder, the last thing you want is a bloated company - nor bloated salaries for the employees.

So here's the deal. Any stockholder who is currently an employee of the company, or in some way paid by the company - such as board members - should logically be prevented from voting on corporate issues. Makes perfect sense doesn't it? I mean, considering that CEO salaries have skyrocketed far faster than any runaway government program, and considering all the Fortune 50 implosions in the last year alone, I think that we could really do some good by implementing Herr Derbyshire's thesis.

Don't worry. Just kidding.

Jimm has a great post over at his blog ForFreedomCentury as to what is really at stake in the FCC vote that is literally days away.

I just can't help but have a small grin on my face, though. This whole media concentration crap is something that Noam Chomsky has been pointing out for literally decades. Granted that Chomsky has a lot of problems and issues. So do I. So does every human on the planet that ever lived and ever will live. Well, I guess the only exception is the Right, who are always correct and have absolutely no issues what so ever.

But say what you want about Chomsky. He was dead right about the media and the manufacture of consent.

Too bad everyone spent so much time deriding him and whining themselves about his style and his other faults instead of actually taking what they could from Chomsky and trying to head this off when it was much, much easier.

Oh well, you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone. Pave paradise and put up a parking lot.

Go read Jimm. He's a heck of a lot better at this than I am...

Historic Mars lander 'did find life'

Dr Gil Levin, a former mission scientist, says he now has the evidence to prove it, just days before the US and Europe send new expeditions to the Red Planet.

Know you've probably seen it but this is getting to be ridiculous.

U.N. dossier on Iraq weapons 'unreliable'

An unidentified expert in Britain's intelligence network told the BBC the 50-page document contained unreliable information and was "transformed" on instructions from Blair's office in the week before its release last September, to make it "sexier."

"The classic example," the BBC quoted the intelligence officer as saying, "was the statement that weapons of mass destruction were ready for use (by Iraq) within 45 minutes."

In the dossier, Blair had warned that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein could activate a chemical and biological arsenal in that time -- a suggestion that became a pillar of Britain's rationale for going to war alongside the United States against Baghdad.

"That information was not contained in the original draft" that had been prepared for the prime minister, he said. "It was included in the dossier against our wishes because it wasn't reliable."

"I would call my colleagues' attention to the fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed... which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities."

Is it safe? Part Deux

In the third straight day of Iraqi violence against the U.S. military occupation of the country, residents enraged over house-to-house searches in this western town ransacked the police station, stoned U.S. armored military vehicles and set police cars on fire Wednesday.

With a large, uncontrolled mob still roaming the streets as dusk fell, it was impossible to determine exactly what triggered the riot, but in a series of chaotic interviews laced with anti-American rage and threats of vengeance, residents said the problems began when police assisted the U.S. troops in searching local homes for weapons.

As night fell, there was no sign of either the police or U.S. forces in the town, and plumes of pitch-black smoke billowed into the air as the remains of two police cars burned along a main street. There were no immediate reports of casualties. The Pentagon said it was aware of anti-American disturbances in several cities Wednesday, including Hit.

Already this week, ambushes carried out in Hadithah, Baghdad and Fallouja have left four U.S. soldiers dead and 15 others wounded.

However, as we are now all painfully aware, the war may be short but the aftermath is forever. The same pattern we saw with the Millennium Games, which is also the exact same pattern shown by the economic disaster known as the Administration's tax cuts, is also the exact same pattern we are now witnessing with the occupation of Iraq.

Remember how we were supposed to be greeted as liberators? Well, except for a few dozen people pulling statues down in scripted affairs, there has been non-stop looting, rioting in Iraq. We're now on our second "administration" in Iraq, after the first one headed by James Garner screwed the pooch royally. We were told that Iraq was going to be unleashed in a libertarian love fest of free market capitalism which would flower into a liberal democracy.

I know it's silly to ask, but why on earth does anyone believe anything these people say? They game the system by scripting the simulations, suppressing reports that show the opposite of what they are purporting. They suppress any investigation that might show us what a complete bunch of idiots they are. And everyone just seems to be okay with this. Amazing.

It truly is an Orwellian world we live in.

But I'm sure glad we're safe. Hey, hand me that drill. Yea. The rusty one. I'm going for that molar in the back.

Is it safe?

Blair faces revolt as US admits doubts

Glad there's at least one democratic country who actually holds their leaders to a standard that's somewhere above sea level.

"Saying that they can't find the weapons, and they may never find the weapons, blows an enormous gaping hole through the case for war that was made on both sides of the Atlantic," Mr Cook told Chan nel 4 News last night. "That has to be investigated - a [Commons] select committee is one way of pursuing it."

British officials insisted there was no contradiction between the prime minister and Mr Rumsfeld because London and Washington agree on two key issues: that Iraq had banned weapons when the UN security council agreed resolution 1441 last November and that Iraq failed to comply with the resolution.

This explanation did not wash with Mr Cook who said that Mr Rumsfeld's remarks proved that his own warning on the eve of war - that Iraq did not pose a serious threat - was true. Mr Cook told Radio 4: "Plainly it did not have such weapons or they would have found them by now."

Saying that Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, should have been allowed to carry on with his work, Mr Cook mocked Mr Blair's claims about the Iraqi threat. "We were told Saddam had weapons ready for use within 45 minutes. It's now 45 days since the war finished and we still have not found anything ... We could have avoided this war."

I've been thinking about this psychology a lot lately. And it's pretty obvious to me that this Administration and pretty much the majority of the US population is nothing more than a bunch of fraidy cats. They are so scared of all the shadows out there that they must do everything they possibly can to make themselves feel safe. It's like it's a bad version of The Marathon Man. This Administration seems like the lunatic Nazi who's out to finally get his diamonds. And the rest of the world is like Dustin Hoffman's character. We're all being drilled in a tortuous attempt to prove what cannot be proved because the very premise is false.

Face it. There is no way to be completely safe. None. The world is a scary place and it's our job to make it safer for the next generation. And what we have done is screw the pooch royally. We've pretty much drilled the teeth of the very people we need to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, not to mention the very people we need cooperation from to catch the very real bad people.

It's a lunatic strategy that proves that those who are behind this are just frightened little men (and women) who are so scared of all the bogeymen out there that they are willing to torture, maim, destroy and completely dominate the rest of the world to make themselves feel safer.

Guess what? It doesn't work that way. Never has, never will.

Idiots.

Protest mars Oliver North's appearance at fund-raiser

"Here these people say they are Christian and they support a man who funded today's terrorists and those who were running drugs to our kids," said Rev. Don Thompson, founder of Coalition of Concerned Patriots, a 30-member activist group.

Oceania is at war with Afghanistan Iraq Syria Iran. Oceania has always been at war with Afghanistan Iraq Syria Iran.

The Phoenix Program

Created by the CIA in Saigon in 1967, Phoenix was a program aimed at "neutralizing"—through assassination, kidnapping, and systematic torture—the civilian infrastructure that supported the Viet Cong insurgency in South Vietnam. It was a terrifying "final solution" that violated the Geneva Conventions and traditional American ideas of human morality. (For a full introduction to Phoenix, see below.)

While researching the Phoenix Program for my book on the subject, I conducted over a hundred interviews and collected boxes full of documents from individuals, as well as from the State Department and Department of Defense. The most important documents provided by any one individual came from retired CIA officer Nelson Brickham, the man most responsibile for the creation of the Phoenix Program.

Luckily for history, Brickham kept copies of the documents he wrote while with the CIA; otherwise, there would be no documentary evidence of how Phoenix was actually created. During the evacuation of Saigon in April 1975, the CIA destroyed most of the documents it had about its assassination program, and none of what it kept at Langley headquarters can be obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. This is no accident, for Phoenix is the model for the equally terrifying US homeland security aparatus.

Oh, and thank "Bob" for The Memory Hole.

Added Mobile Weapons Labs and WMD warheads to the scoreboard. Just to be consitent.

Pentagon was warned over policing Iraq

Robert Perito, a former diplomat who had designed a similar police mission in Haiti nine years ago, put together a detailed plan on how to deal with postwar lawlessness, warning that regular troops, trained to shoot to kill or retreat, were not right for the job.

He wrote a report for the United States Institute for Peace and briefed the defence policy board, a Pentagon advisory panel, in February. He said the board had appeared to agree with his conclusions but no action was taken.

"The need for specialised forces was widely anticipated, but they have only just got there and are going to be just in Baghdad," he said. "The damage has already been incalculable. The bombing campaign was conducted in such a way by the air force to meticulously preserve key government facilities, cultural sites, hospitals and other civilian buildings. But as soon as the conflict ended, those facilities were destroyed by looters."

Similar warnings and recommendations were made by experts at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council, and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. The Council on Foreign Relations study was overseen by a Republican former defence secretary and member of the defence policy board, James Schlesinger. It was presented to White House officials but its recommendation, that a police force be sent alongside the combat force was not acted on.

MR. RUSSERT: General Pace, let me show you an article from Reuters a short time ago. This is the Army's top general -- repeated his estimate that a postwar occupying force in Iraq could be as large as several hundred thousand troops -- a number disputed by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki told a House Subcommittee on Defense Appropriations the military could only estimate what forces might be needed after any invasion of Iraq. It could be as high as several hundred thousand. He's consistent.

GEN. PACE: Well, I think what he is -- the main phrase there was "could only estimate." And we don't know what the postwar Iraq is going to look like. It will be the conditions at that time that will describe how many forces, how many coalition forces are needed. The bottom line is that after we defeat the armed forces of Iraq that we will want to and need to provide stability throughout that country. It will take a certain size force. We don't know what size force. But it will be those forces that will stabilize the environment, allow the government to begin to rebuild, and allow the Iraqi people to select the kind of government that they want.

MR. WOLFOWITZ: Tim, the important message to the Iraqis and to everybody in that region is that we do not come as a new colonial power, we do not come as an army of occupation. We come as an army of liberation, and we want to see the Iraqis running their own affairs as soon as they can.

MR. RUSSERT: But it is a nation of 23 million people. And if General Shinseki believes it's going to take a force of 200,000 American troops, he should keep on saying that, shouldn't he?

GEN. PACE: All of our leaders should give our best military advice whenever we are asked it. But you have, for example, in Afghanistan, a country that is larger, has maybe three or four million more people than are currently in Iraq, and the U.S. coalition force there is around 10,000. So to try to equate millions of people on the ground with how many forces are needed truly is not the right exercise. What you need to determine is what missions need to be accomplished, and then how many forces do you need to do that to give the Iraqi people a chance to rebuild their own army, get their own police force up, get their own government working, so we in fact can leave as quickly as possible.

MR. RUSSERT: But in Afghanistan the only secure place is actually Kabul. The rest of the country is being treated in a very chaotic fashion. Are you concerned that unless we have a significantly large American presence in Iraq we could be creating another Afghanistan, which would be a haven for terrorists to come to Iraq rather than Afghanistan to kill Americans?

GEN. PACE: Actually, in Afghanistan the only part that is really insecure is the part in the southeast border area. Most of the rest of Afghanistan is fairly well secure, and is in fact rebuilding. I am very proud of what we have been able to do in Afghanistan as a coalition, and I am very proud of the progress that is being made in Afghanistan. In Iraq, as I've said, we will need whatever size force is required to help them establish a stability to rebuild their institutions, so we can turn over to the Iraqi people their own country, let them build their own government, and let them become a partner in the world community.

DR Congo going to hell in a handbasket.

Over the past four years, Congo's war has claimed more lives than any other. The International Rescue Committee, an American aid agency, says that by the middle of last year, 2.5m people had died because of the war in eastern Congo alone. Some were shot or hacked to death; many more succumbed to starvation or disease as nine national armies and a shifting throng of rebel groups pillaged their country. By now, the death toll is probably over 3m, although this is the roughest of estimates. As one UN worker puts it: “Congo is so green, you don't even see the graves.”

So why isn't this getting a lot of air play? Certainly, there's nothing the US can really directly do. After all, we have that whole Iraq thing going on. But what about leadership in the international community to get something - anything - done about this dreadful situation? Call me a bleeding heart liberal, but regardless of what we personally lost or gained by completely trashing international relations and institutions over the Iraq war, the people who really ended up losing are people like those trapped in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Remember Kosovo? Of course you do. After all, the Right wingers have been constituently throwing it in the face of the anti-war crowd since the fall of Iraq. Remember how they were saying that no one was doing anything, and that the UN had failed to act and all that? Well, the whole darn scenario is playing out again. It's an incredibly tough situation where it's completely unclear how to deal with this crap. What's needed is clear leadership and a skillful diplomatic effort to solve this problem before it becomes a complete catastrophe.

But given our international relations of late, I think that unlike Kosovo, the US isn't going to be doing any leading in this area.

Another interesting fact about the situation is that this all started with another tragedy that no one in the international community - including the US - did anything about. Rwanda. Remember them? Of course you do. After all, the Right wingers have been periodically using Rwanda as another example of how pathetic the UN is at doing anything.

Oh well. Guess we're just going to spend all our time looking for the other essential pieces to the Iraqi mobile bio weapons labs. Don't you think that the situation in DR Congo deserves at least this much attention from the brain trust of this Administration? How about the effort to get the Tax Cut passed. Think these people deserve at least that much attention?

Western powers seem barely to have noticed the catastrophe. This is partly because, unlike the Middle East, Congo has no strategic importance. But it is also because it is two-thirds the size of Western Europe, thickly-forested, incredibly dangerous and has hardly any paved roads or working telephones. Simply finding out what is happening in Congo is a cAzaellenge, as your correspondent discovered while accompanying militiamen on patrol by the shore of Lake Kivu last week, when he was forced to hide in a bush to avoid 200 hostile Rwandan soldiers passing by.

Pay me now or pay me later.

Intelligence report: mobile labs are the strongest evidence yet of Iraqi biological weapons

Well, we'll see.

''BW (Biological weapon) agent production is the only consistent, logical purpose for these vehicles,'' the report says.

Coalition experts on fermentation and systems engineering examined the trailer found in late April and have been unable to identify any legitimate industrial use—such as water purification, mobile medical laboratory, vaccine or pharmaceutical production—that would justify the effort and expense of a mobile production capability. We have investigated what other industrial processes may require such equipment—a fermentor, refrigeration, and a gas capture system—and agree with the experts that BW agent production is the only consistent, logical purpose for these vehicles.

But let's assume that this is a legitimate mobile bio weapon factory find. The question is then, was this sufficient reason to go to war? If all this does turn out to be true, the mighty Wurlitzer will take this as complete evidence for the correctness of the WMD justification for the preemptive war. "See? We have mobile fermenters that have no other explanation than biological weapons production. It's been a year and a Azaelf, and we haven't found the other pieces necessary to actually have a complete mobile bioweapons facility, but we're confident they will be found." I predict that will be completely sufficient for the American populace.

But I'm still going to be asking about the 30,000 warheads, thousands of liters of Anthrax and Botulinum, and hundreds of tons of chemical weapons. Certainly all the nuclear claims made by this administration are laughably false. Then there's the means to deliver this and actual threaten the US. Namely, terrorist connections. On that front, we're still batting 0. Not that anyone is noticing or anything.

I think that just a mere finger hold is all that the Great Oz actually needs to keep enough of the American populace satisfied. Certainly all of the media will be satisfied. After all, when you wage a preemptive war you don't want to hear anything that might make you believe you were lied to in its justification. Throwing good money after bad is a sadly predictable human reaction to things they are psychologically invested in, as Bill Bennet knows all too well.

We'll have to see after independent experts have weighed in on the issue.

David Frum is a moron.

Toady. Bootlicker. Tank wipe.

But there is a difference between union violence and those other forms of violence – which is that the potential for violence inheres in the most basic dynamic of what unions do. A strike is a very powerful weapon if the striking workers cannot easily be replaced. But it is close to useless if the workers who withdraw their labor can be replaced by other workers willing and able to do the same jobs for less pay. The only way to make the strike weapon effective is to deter and debar those alternative workers from accepting the striking workers’ jobs – and violence has historically been an essential tactic.

And that is why, when a bomb goes off after a year of labor disputes, the disputing union seems like a very plausible suspect.

Looks like the Krugman Truth Squad is adding visual aids for their intellectually cAzaellenged readers. I just noticed that they have a picture of Paul Krugman on the graphic with the Sodium Pentathol kid. And that picture of the Dapper Don has always struck me as a bit odd. Kind of a subliminal promise to the reader that he'll stroke your ego long time, I guess. Eeewwwww.

Disenfranchise the Public Sector

Herr Derbyshire is taking the gloves off this time. Can't wait for Busy, Busy, Busy's shorter version of this stinky loaf. I love it when everyone starts talking about the right to vote and who should get it. I was raised on Robert Heinlein and his wiley libertarian ways.

Tip of the hat to Herr Derbyshire. Got to love someone who just comes right out and says what they're thinking. Makes it easier to tag the lunatics for tracking in the wild.

"You are like a stream of bat's piss"

You shine out like a shaft of gold when all around is dark*.

Granted, I'm slow. Rock on, Jr. Have fun with it.
___________________________
*Monty Python

Something I wish all the supporters of the war with Iraq would read.

I've railed on PNAC and such at quite some length. This is written by someone far more eloquent than I. Take a gander - again. And then tell me that they "mean well".

J. McIntyre over at RealClear Politics talks about the importance of finding WMD. He's one of the few right wing bloggers I link to because even though I disagree with him on almost every issue, he's not insane. He's reasoned and generally interesting - if wrong. But that's what debate is all about. Today he's railing against the NY Post's Sunday lead editorial No WMD's? So What? It's refreshing to see someone on the Right actually give a damn about actually finding the suckers, rather than just flit about with the various re-justifications that are now in style.

Still, I got to wonder what McIntyre thinks about the level of threat that we were led to believe existed. Granted, no one really knows what we'll find in the future, but at this point I think everyone is pretty well accepting of the fact that the threat posed by Saddam was laughable at best. And still it was used as the reason we had to invade Iraq. McIntyre is still convinced that we're going to find them. Everyone is still convinced we're going to find them. Except, of course, the majority of the press who are now saying that it doesn't matter if we find them.

There's a bit of a thread running through all this self denial, though, exemplified by the Post's editorial

If credible evidence emerges showing that Bush intentionally lied about Saddam's WMDs, that's a problem.

(And we'll eat our hats.)

If so, Bush's credibility would be shot.

Not to mention America's.

What's interesting - to me at least - about all this, is the incredible similarity the whole WMD thing has to the various "End of the World" cults that have peppered our history. There are still cults which have predicted the end of the world multiple times now. Some as high as 10 to 20 times. I can't find the name of the cult now, but there has been one in the US which has been regularly predicting the end of the world for decades - if not over a hundred years. The interesting question is why, when the world doesn't end, don't the members of the cult just leave in disgust or worse?

This is a pretty interesting psychological issue. After all, when the prediction is made that the end of the world will be at Date/Time X, and then X passes and the world just continues on, one would think that everyone in the cult would just realize they were all bamboozled and move on to more productive belief systems. Instead, it seems the opposite occurs. In a weird twist, people who've investigated these cult members find that their faith is actually strengthened by these events which to everyone else prove that they're just a pack of lunatics.

And so it is with the WMD Tiffin phantasms we were prodded to war with. McIntyre is correct to be pushing the fact that evidence of WMD does matter, but what's strange is that he doesn't have any metrics for what would have constituted a threat of the significance we were led to believe. I mean, we're just not finding anything at all. Nothing. The Three Mobile labs that the NY Post was touting as "a possible start of a stream of evidence" have turned up absolutely nothing. Although it hasn't been reported at all, our local news station here in the SF Bay Area reported last Saturday night that there isn't even a whiff of WMD - biological or chemical - in these mobile labs. Nothing. They keep bringing up the fact that these labs were cleaned with an unknown chemical which might have removed all traces of WMD production - an obvious attempt to keep the door wide open in everyone's mind.

Oh well. I think it's pretty funny to see everyone so sure of something without even a hint of what metric they will use to judge the evidence. And the longer this takes, the higher the probability is that we simply won't care anymore. Bush has got all his scapegoats set up and ready to fall on their swords - i.e. the intelligence agencies. And since they have completely clamped the lid securely shut on any evidence that might point to the contrary, I'm pretty sure those Genies will stay bottled up until way after the 2004 election.

But it is pretty odd. For all the talk from the Right for verifiable, provable and a cost based philosophy, they are mighty slack with the whole going to war based on imminent danger of WMD thing.

And like a member of the various end of the world cults, it will only make their faith stronger when we finally determine that we were indeed fooled by this administration. After all, Iran is looking to be the next lucky contestant, and all the intelligence being used to justify that action - however it turns out - is looking just as laughable as the forged Niger documents that our President used to frighten us regarding Iraq. And when that starts happening, the facts on the ground will overwhelm the absence of facts regarding Iraq. And things will be moving ahead so fast that no one will bother to remember how we started this all off in the first place.

Kind of makes you proud to be an American.

Well, back to pathetic loser blogging. I see that Atrios jr. has shown us all how it's done by enlightening us with the earth shattering news that CalPundit, Josh MarsAzaell and Bob Harris are intelligent, informative bloggers.

In other rather scarry news, my morning Stratfor intelligence briefing is about the two US soldiers killed in two attacks on US convoys.

These are serious events. An opposition clearly has been organized and now is capable of carrying out attacks on U.S. forces. These are not militarily significant at this point, since they do not affect the ability of the
United States to occupy Iraq. But they do have substantial political implications. At this moment, the trend line on the U.S. occupation is downward. The perception -- and to some extent the reality -- of the situation is that Washington has not gained control of the situation in Iraq, that improvements have been slow in coming. The attacks, which must be assumed to be coordinated, indicates that there are forces still operational in Iraq that can reverse what progress there has been.

When the US military public relations agents staged the show with toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad's Paradise Square the total number of officially acknowledged coalition fatalities in the operation "Iraqi Freedom" stood at 148. Since then another 120 coalition troops, including 52 US and 62 Spanish soldiers, lost their lives in the war that's, according to the British and US leadership, is out of its active combat stage.

Strange how you don't hear any "gee, you were right about the quagmire of Iraq occupation". Especially given the spate of articles over the last couple of days essentially saying just that.

US sends in extra troops to quell unrest

further 20,000 US troops are to be deployed in Iraq amid growing concerns that there are insufficient forces to bring law and order to the country after the American-led invasion

Ex-Iraqi Officers Threaten Protests, Suicide Attacks

"If our demands are not respected, next Monday will mark the date of the break between the Iraqi army and people on one side and the occupiers on the other," he said in reference to US-led coalition troops.
"All soldiers and their families will protest peacefully in Baghdad and other towns on Monday from 10 am (0600 GMT)."
The protesting band of officers carried banners saying "Better to have the throat slit than revenues confiscated. The Iraqi army demands its rights!", and "The Iraqi army is the army of the people and the nation!"
"Death, death so Iraq can live!" they chanted.

Baghdad Is Asking, Where Are the Police?
Unfulfilled Promises Leave Iraqis Bewildered

People are confused that U.S. military forces, assumed to be all-powerful, have delivered little. They are unsettled by the lawlessness that has encouraged religious forces to step into the breach and vigilantes to dole out their own brand of justice. They are bitter at the promises -- yet unfulfilled -- of a better life that would follow the war. To many of its residents, Baghdad is a capital both liberated and occupied, but most of all just bewildered.

"The price was expensive," said Qassam Alsabti, an artist sipping tea at his Baghdad art gallery. "We all have conflicting feelings -- joy and grief. I see people happy they are freed from what once hung over them. But when you look at Baghdad, from up high, you see the efforts of 100 years wiped out in a month. We knew we had to pay a price, but not in this ugly way."

Top Religious Leader Calls on Iraqis to Resist Occupation

After all, the problems with Iran are heating up. This is a really strange one, as Iran and Al Qaeda are not exactly friends. But then again, neither was Saddam and Al Qaeda. But seeing as how we still have yet to find even a whiff of WMD, nor have we found any terrorists links AT ALL... Well, it's not surprising that we're going after Iran based on another complete lie.

It's like Deja Vu all over again. The pattern is pretty much identical. Make a baseless claim and then start pummeling the enemy with it. Iran, after all, isn't really the nicest of countries. It's ruled by fundamental religious nuts, and actually does support terrorism against Israel. So, if it were to disappear or have a regime change, you really wouldn't find a lot of people outside of Hammas that would shed too many tears.

So the press, in its desperate drive to expose the truth, is talking about the talk. No analysis of the claims the Administration is saying. Listening to NPR talk about it this morning, it was pretty much the same as the build up to the Iraq war. No discussion about how the Taliban had a campaign against Shi'ite Muslims. No analysis of the rifts between the various factions of Moslems out there. It's kind of like discussions where Christianity is referred to only as a homogenous belief system, ignoring the bitter rivalries between the various factions. Anyone who's been to a Baptist church and raised the issue of baptizing infants knows precisely what kind of deep and bitter divisions occur amongst even the "civilized" Christians.

Oh well. As far as I can tell, there really isn't much of a discussion going on in Congress as to the wisdom of instigating a regime change in Iran. I heard Biden say "slow down" on the talk shows Sunday, but considering that Biden's influence over this administration is just a bit greater than my ability to influence them, it's just a laughable quote opportunity for the media to lambaste the Democrats with.

Speaking of lambasting the Democrats, can someone please tell me how we became the Communist party? I've heard this quite a bit now, echoing back through various sources. What the heck are we doing that's pushing for communism? I understand that a lot of this comes from the Limbaugh megaphone, but I'm even hearing formerly intelligent acquaintances parrot this back to me. This tar and feathering operation on the Right is really getting effective. Amazing.

Well, that's it for this pathetic loser post. Off to further fun and adventure.

As Many as 1 Million Demonstrate in Morocco Against Terrorism

Very cool.

Eschaton, jr. takes me to task for advertising on Eschaton.

Oh, and obviously, this goes for those of you who actually pay to advertise your blog on Eschaton. Are you kidding me? This is pathetic... You're actually paying for a link on another blogger's site? Here's the rundown of the current offenders of this "look at me!" phenomenon: Marduck's Babylonian Musings, Meme Cauldron, Where's the Soap?, and the Liquid List.

Hmmm... What's more pathetic? Having a pathetic loser blog like mine, or kicking a pathetic loser blog like mine in the nuts?

Snapped a nice picture of the beast viewed as mounted in the vacuum chamber.

click on the picture for a larger image

In the picture, you can see the cage in the bottom Azaelf of the vacuum chamber. The top of the spherical chamber is just barely visible at the top of the picture, hanging from the hoist I just put in for this purpose. Heck of a lot easier to manipulate the system alone with this setup now. The high voltage feedthrough is the big white insulator on the bottom left of the picture. I still don't have the feedthrough connected to the cage, so I still can't do any testing. The fitting is pretty tight and I need to do some head scratching as to how to make the electrical connection. But I wanted to do a pressure test anyway, to see if I had any virtual leaks in the insulation supports. After much tightening on the five zillion bolts on the chamber, I got down to 2 x 10-6 Torr after about 1/2 hour of pumping. I'm going to have to replace all the Viton seals I have with copper seals... That'll be fun. The feeling had just returned to my fingers after installing the Viton seals...

Closer. Getting closer. If you want to bore yourself with more details, click here.

Iraq Weapons Hunters Drop Outdated Leads

Those leads were so twentieth century, dude.

In the war's early days, American officers said they expected to find such huge stockpiles of unconventional weapons that their main concern was whether they had enough people to destroy the materials.

"It never occurred to anyone, not even for 10 seconds, that we wouldn't find any," said Capt. David Norris, who heads Mobile Exploitation Team Charlie.

"The frustration level is increasing as we keep getting constant negative results," said Lt. Col. Keith Harrington, 42, who spent years in the Special Forces before joining the Pentagon.

The original teams weren't designed to carry out the kind of detective work that U.N. inspectors mastered over their years in Iraq, mostly because military planners were convinced such weapons would be easily found once Saddam was gone.

Hmmm... Let's see. I have this Time Magazine I've been keeping around for just such an occasion. It's the December 23, 2002 edition. Kind of a Christmas present from Mortimer B. Zuckerman - editor-in-chief of Time Magazine. In the editorial by Herr Zuckerman entitled Put-up or shut-up time, he clearly states that the entire reason for the then impending war with Iraq was the entire WMD issue. Quoting JFK, Morti ended with

Forty years ago, President Kennedy observed that "we no longer live in a world where only the actual firing of weapons constitute maximum peril." JFK acted. Today, the truth he enunciated is magnified a thousandfold, and it is to the great credit of President Bush that he recognizes it and is responding with the same courage and fortitude.

Frist Says Republicans Want To Make Bush's Tax Cuts Permanent

Who'd have guessed? So I guess the 330 Billion is really over 800 Billion after all. Likely far higher.

Asked whether the tax cuts should be extended, Senator Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat running for president, said, ``Well, it depends on where the economy is at the time.''

``It depends which taxes,'' he said on Fox. ``There are some middle-class tax cuts that naturally you'd like to keep in place. There's other tax cuts that I think are extremely wasteful.''

Hamas: Cease-fire is a viable option

Wow. Maybe there really is hope for something to actually work after all.

Paul Wolfowitz and Frank Langella.

Separated at birth?

First time I saw Wolfie on Meet The Press, I thought he was Frank Langella on acid.

Shorter Paul Wolfowitz: I am become death, the destroyer of worlds

UK troops may go to DR Congo

Thank "Bob" someone is paying attention.

Bush is on brink of decision whether to launch fresh military action – this time against Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Hey, it's DEBKA. So make sure you have plenty of salt on hand when you read it.

Just some Saturday entertainment for y'all.

It's funny to read the House Joint Resolution Authorizing Use of Force Against Iraq

A virus like SARS is found in animals

Finally some 'splaining about SARS.

A virus virtually identical to the one believed to cause SARS in humans has been found in a catlike, tree-dwelling animal whose meat is a delicacy in southern China and in two other species, scientists here and at the World Health Organization in Geneva said Friday.

Blix casts doubt on WMDs

The chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, said he was starting to suspect Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction in advance of the war on Iraq, a German newspaper reported today.

"I am obviously very interested in the question of whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction, and I am beginning to suspect there possibly were none," Mr Blix told the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel.

If that were the case, he said, Iraq's evasive behaviour in recent years could be due to Saddam Hussein's fixation with Iraqi honour and a wish to dictate the conditions under which people could enter the country.

"For that reason, he said 'no' in many situations and gave the impression he was hiding something," he said.

I'm not saying that this is the explanation. All I'm saying is that it is a plausible explanation for why he didn't cooperate. It's what Bloefeld would do. James Bond would have to kill him before he submitted to the same inspection regime. But apparently everyone in the US - or the majority, which is all that matters - can't possibly think of any other explanation. He must have had them.

Mr Blix pointed to statements by Lt Gen Amer al-Saadi, who officials say led Iraq's unconventional weapons programmes and surrendered to US-led forces last month.

"The fact that al-Saadi surrendered and said there were no weapons of mass destruction has led to me to ask myself whether there actually were any," Mr Blix told the paper. "I don't see why he would still be afraid of the regime, and other leading figures have said the same."

Face it. These guys have been subjected to every modern interrogation technique known. Given our treatment of the Gitmo prisoners, and those prisoners that definitely died under torture in Afghanistan, these Iraqi prisoners have likely been tortured as well. They're either fanatical monks trained like David Caradine in the Kung Fu television series with mind control techniques seen only in myth... Or we've all been handed a big bag of shit.

At some point, Occam's razor has got to kick in. Which is more unlikely to believe? That he was a super villain worthy of James Bond, or we were all played like a cheap violin. What a bunch of aqua maroons.

Okay, gotta get back to the mill stone. Another couple of hours and I get some shut eye...

Quotes like this keep me laughing down here on the 8th level.

Let's see: Clinton presided over a recession-free eight-year presidency. He used the first budget cycle of what looked for a while as if it would be a de facto Gingrich presidency to begin the process of destroying Gingrich's credibility, turning Newt and his mighty Contract with America into national jokes. But he's the bumbler. Meanwhile, Bush is Top Gun: he drives the economy off a cliff, but he does it on time.

Sooner or later, the Iraqis are going to be remembering that as evil as Saddam was, he got the trains to run on time. Maybe we were starving, but the substandard food rations showed up on time.

And as everything collapses in America, we'll look back fondly because Bush got things done on a schedule.

Radio ID chips may track banknotes

I actually am working with these RF ID thingies. The hilarious thing about this, is that with this inclusion, they will now be able to track how money flows in the system. You get cash from your ATM, and it notes which bills you were issued. You spend them, and that's now noted.

Good bye anonymous cash.

Bush 'is on brink of catastrophe'

Ya think? Gee, if I were a betting man like Bennet, I don't think I'd be betting the milk money on it. I mean, yea, it is all going to go to hell in a hand basket - nicely done up with a ribbon - but I doubt that Bush is going to get any blame for it.

THE most senior Republican authority on foreign relations in Congress has warned President Bush that the United States is on the brink of catastrophe in Iraq.

Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that Washington was in danger of creating “an incubator for terrorist cells and activity” unless it increased the scope and cost of its reconstruction efforts. He said that more troops, billions more dollars and a longer commitment were needed if the US were not to throw away the peace.

“I want to see evidence that the Administration is in this for the long haul to create a stable, democratic Iraq, and to acknowledge that this will place a significant burden on the American people,” Mr Lugar said. He referred to estimates that the reconstruction of Iraq may cost $100 billion, compared to the $2.5 billion approved by Congress so far.

Sure glad we're stirring the terrorist pot while our states languish in record deficits. Sure glad that 100 BILLION Is going to those Iraqis, and not to those bloated Democratic states. Wait. Even Andrew Sullivan points out that it isn't the Democrat's fault at all. In fact, Democratic controlled states' budgets have grown less than Republicans! Imagine that.

But we'll just keep pulling the wool over our eyes. We're in it up to our necks now. And if there's one thing that is crystal clear from observing human behavior, it's now a matter of pride. We can't possibly think we did the wrong thing. We're going to ride out this black hole until we see what's on the other side.

YEEEEEEEEEEEE HAAAAAAAAAAWWWWW!

The head ignores the feet

Gotta love it when the Economist weighs in on the obvious.

IN STATE capitals across America, there is only one story in town: the disaster facing state budgets. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, states face revenue shortfalls totalling $21.5 billion this fiscal year, which ends in June—23% more than they thought in November. Barely a day goes by but local newspapers report a new cut in services.

Back in Washington, the administration seems about as concerned as it would be by a budget deficit in France. In his original proposal for next year's federal budget, President Bush asked Congress for no extra aid to the states (though the deal struck in Congress this week would provide $20 billion, at the Senate's suggestion).

Worse, the administration has piled new obligations on state and local governments without providing the money for them. For example, this week's raising of the national terror alert to “orange” will require states to spend more on security. The administration also insists on election reform—a state responsibility—and costly “vulnerability assessments” of water systems, without providing the cash.

Feedback could warm climate fast

Now the Hadley team balances the books with a new holistic climate model - dubbed the Earth systems approach. "We can recreate twentieth-century climate and still have a strong positive feedback in the future," says the team's leader, Chris Jones. "You need to look at more than just greenhouse gases."

One of the most significant factors in models of climate warming is future production of sulphates. These atmospheric pollutants, released in huge amounts by the burning of coal and oil in the twentieth century, actually cool the planet by reflecting sunlight. So as sulphate emissions fall due to clean-air regulations warming will actually increase.

"It looks like [Jones' team is] about right," says Sarmiento. But he warns that modelling the importance of the feedback from stored carbon from oceans and forests of the future is a tricky business. "There is a lot of uncertainty associated with this stuff".

But weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Heck. All we need is some forged documents and some specious arguments containing the Al Qaeda bogeyman and we're willing to drop 200 BILLION dollars in one year alone - "Bob" only knows how much in the next few years.

All I can say is that everyone must be a real pack of idiots. Willing to go to war at the drop of a hat over fraudulent and down right laughable evidence. Not willing to lift a finger to prevent or mitigate a global catastrophe. You guys sure have your priorities straight. And you're so consistent!

Sars 'from the stars'

Okay, all you who thought my Alien Colonialist explanation of events was wacky, well... Just take a gander at this gem. (heh)

In a letter to The Lancet, the scientists, led by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe of Britain's Cardiff University, say the Sars coronavirus is so unlike other viruses that an extra-terrestrial origin is logical.

However, a number of Sars experts believe the theory itself seems to have come from another planet.

The idea that Sars comes from the stars relates to a theory called panspermia. This says that life itself evolved somewhere out in the cosmos, and is carried from one planet to another on comets.

Professor Wickramasinghe, who is a leading panspermia enthusiast, says the Sars coronavirus is so unusual that it could not have arisen on Earth.

"The particular genetic sequences of this Sars virus appears to be dramatically different from all the other known coronaviruses; and that has suggested an independent evolution of that virus to be required."

Geesh!

Well, the whip is a flickin', and I got's to pour some cement. Luckily I can do these posts over my PDA down here in hell. Again, their infrastructure down here is quite impressive. Blue tooth, 3G cell networks. The works.

Ouch. That means I gotta go.

So, I'm reporting live from the 8th circle of hell. As you can expect, it's been a "hell" of a week. Lots of moaning and gnashing of teeth. The lead lined cape I was issued was a bit uncomfortable at first, but it kind of grows on you.

I'm digging sewers down here. Just about putting the finishing touches on the latest civil works project down here. Apparently, there's a lot of shit going to come down the pike, and they needed to expand the capacity for handling it. Amazing how efficient Hell is run. You'd think with the high percentage of civil servants that this wouldn't be the case, but geesh. I guess the after life has a way of increasing your focus.

In any event, back on the surface, it looks like the week was pretty much as I expected. More revelations that should have turned into a major scandal, with the press just yawning and taking some time to beat up on Sydney BlumentAzael. Probably the most depressing thing I heard all week was the meme "Bush was FDR and WMD was our Pearl Harbor" poking its nose up to see the light of day. As amazing as it is to believe, people are actually starting to suggest that Bush is a greater hero because he used the hopped up WMD evidence to tip American opinion into going into this Just War. Demons were high fiving down here when they heard that, I can tell you.

I even saw this kind of slither by on a Josh MarsAzaell post (yes, they do have DSL down here in Hell. And it's pretty "damn" efficient, I might add).

Regular readers of this site will know I have very mixed feelings about Iraq and still find the arguments for having dealt with it militarily quite compelling.

So, we had a regime with scant to no connections to any terrorists - other than an aged Palestinian terrorist - with absolutely no WMD's or even the capacity to make them. The country is in the middle of a stinking desert, and their military didn't even have the capability to threaten its neighbors, much less the US. And to put the cherry on this ridiculously high shit sundae, we find that Saddam - the evil, evil guy - is still alive and kicking.

Again, what the heck did we do this for? Maybe Josh MarsAzaell will be good enough to explain it to me. After all, I'm not a history buff and maybe there's something that escaped my notice in the non-stop torrent of fraudulent reasons being revealed over the past six weeks. Even though we have excellent cable services and high speed internet connections down here in Malebolge, perhaps some nuanced bit of hope escaped my fevered searches. I guess I'll just have to wait, as Josh doesn't answer my email requesting an explanation from him. And I can't find any buried in any of his posts or other writings.

But this is a common theme amongst just about everyone I talk to lately. Strangely enough, Hell has excellent Cell Phone infrastructure, so I also able to keep in touch with various people I use to judge the direction of the wind. Everyone had the same story.

I'm still waiting for the results that will convince me that this was a good idea, and I expect not to be able to tell for at least a couple of years. If we can get a Palestinian state and a vaguely democratic government in Iraq in 2 years, I'll be very pleased by the results.

But that's the way it is when you have absolutely no standards of measurement to base progress on. As much as the Right loves to jump all over Liberals for things like "HEAD START" for being a waste of money because it isn't even doing what it was supposed to do - according to tests - and as much as the Right wants to make sure that no student gets advanced to the next grade unless they pass a test... Well, I can't find anyone who is willing to lay down a line to measure what the heck we're accomplishing in Iraq. Not Josh, not anyone. The goal posts don't even exist. It's all being made up as we totter about, doing our business.

But hey! We got the tax cut passed! Dick Cheney was dragged out of his undisclosed location and cast the deciding vote - twice! Amazing to see the big Dick swinging that vote of his like he used to in 2001. Only Azaelf of what the Prez wanted. But what the heck? The whole bill is an elaborate construction of smoke and mirrors anyway. The only reason it is only 350 Billion dollars is because they "sunset" the very tax cuts that they're providing. And since the Right has already stated that they're going to make these cuts permanent... Well, I just got to ask how honest these Senators who were sticking to 350 Billion on principle really are. After all, all the sunset provisions of the first tax cut have now either been eliminated, or will in the next few months.

Smoke and mirrors. Smoke and mirrors. And down here in the eighth level of hell, you see a lot of that, too.

So we enter a new enlightened age here in America. We seem to have perfected the "lying to yourself" mode of political operation. It used to be that the political lies were really small and for the most part, innocuous. Yea, there was a lot of pork in the budget, but at least people were working. Things were getting done. Money is the oil of politics, after all. But now it seems we're running the entire system on the political equivalent of Slick 50. Nothing sticks to anything these days, and the money is running through the system faster than a Nun's first curry. Yi!

Yesterday I heard some Republican Yokel on CrossFire tell us that the reason that our first responders haven't gotten any money for their homeland security responsibilities is because they haven't filled out the right forms! You see? It's all really just a paperwork problem. If these guys hadn't been sitting on their asses for the past 20 months, they would have gotten their precious communication systems and funding for all the myriad of other things they need to do to keep us safe. Geesh. Paperwork. Morons.

Well, my break is just about up here. I have to swig down the last of my mocha - yes, they have Starbucks down here, too. The Baristas are a bit odd looking, but the coffee is very good. The foreman of the crew is flicking his pain whip again, which means we have five minutes.

I tell ya. As painful as it is down here doing this work, all I got to say is it seems better than living up there where y'all are. At least down here, there is no self-lying. Smoke and mirrors, sure. But everything is a smoke and mirror, so there's very little to fool yourself with. Everything is a lie. Up there, well... All you're all doing is lying to yourselves. And I got to tell you, it's hilarious.

Oh well, back to work. Got to finish this before the slew of shit y'all are creating up there comes barreling through the pike down here. We're on a schedule, you know.

Well, the conflict has been resolved:

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Eigth Level of Hell - the Malebolge!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Googleism

Here's the googleism for John Constantine. Who knew?

john constantine is part of an elite government task
john constantine is the most intriguing character in comics today
john constantine is reported to have been employed at various times by the pacific mail steamship company
john constantine is a great magical adept
john constantine is the current magus of the constantine line
john constantine is related to it
john constantine is led down the Azaells of the prison
john constantine is the cigarette smoking trench coat wearing british bloke from hellblazer
john constantine is always botered
john constantine is that you never know whether you're safer working with him
john constantine is the most intriguing character today
john constantine is at last coming home
john constantine is the most hated man on earth
john constantine is from "the books of magic" and various appearances in "the sandman"
john constantine is like trying to nail down a shadow
john constantine is one of my favourite characters in comic book history
john constantine is a smoking
john constantine is a cool character
john constantine is from the series hellblazer
john constantine is the most recent in a line of magi who have had their
john constantine is one
john constantine is in the middle of them
john constantine is
john constantine is part magician
john constantine is still alive in the year 2112? if you recall the books of magic
john constantine is one of my favorite comic book characters
john constantine is faced with other
john constantine is perfect for examining this particular
john constantine is back at the top of his game
john constantine is british
john constantine is a lot of things
john constantine is…uhh…see
john constantine is because i went to his fortieth birthday party
john constantine is a supernatural investigator who
john constantine is available for
john constantine is interesting as well
john constantine is a cynical
john constantine is just a man
john constantine is a character uniquely flexible enough to accommodate the peccadilloes of his various authors without becoming
john constantine is really in a pickle this time
john constantine is one of these icons who everyone reinvents and everyone adds a piece to but nobody can ever really own
john constantine is not a hero
john constantine is the kind of guy who wouldn?t stay in the
john constantine is coming home to england
john constantine is confronted by fbi agent frank turro
john constantine is one of my heroes
john constantine is a great comic book character
john constantine is the man
john constantine is pronounced "con
john constantine is tm and
john constantine is cast
john constantine is a sorcerer with knowledge of arcane hell
john constantine is copyright © dc comics
john constantine is aided by an overzealous female cop in stopping satan from taking over the
john constantine is dead
john constantine is part grifter
john constantine is unique amongst comic characters
john constantine is to be found
john constantine is collected
john constantine is there to make things worse
john constantine is british in the comic book series and if they're going to play him as american
john constantine is sAzaellow and one
john constantine is teaching her
john constantine is dc/vertigo's
john constantine is one of the best examples of the anti
john constantine is in one of his moods
john constantine is exhausting to read
john constantine is the
john constantine is resolved and
john constantine is fucking british
john constantine is in solitary confinement after being suspected of killing a prison guard
john constantine is director of advanced and specialty training at glaxosmithkline
john constantine is never referred to as "hellblazer
john constantine is thrown in the clink
john constantine is a protector to that boy
john constantine is getting old
john constantine is in trouble
john constantine is in the middle of negotiating a magical deal with lord fanny when a certain ex

Been off blogging the last two days because strange thoughts are trying to form in my head. Couple of large scale battles happening in there. Will post later when the two warring sides come to some "consensus" and only one is left standing.

Reverberations from an Iraq prayer meeting

Second Squadron officers were shocked when - after arranging to provide US troops to bolster security at a massive prayer sermon last Friday - a local cleric used the forum to accuse US soldiers of using night-vision goggles to see through the clothing of Iraqi women. He also suggested US troops were passing out candy wrapped with pornographic photographs to Iraqi children. And he said that abducted Iraqi women were being forced to work as prostitutes for US soldiers.

Later in the sermon, the Islamic faithful were invited to engage in terror tactics against US forces.

The prayer sermon was attended by an estimated 30,000 Shiite men who endured 100-plus degree heat to hear the message. Such large gatherings were illegal under the regime of Saddam Hussein.

But there was more to the sermon beyond the allegations. The cleric, Sheikh Kadim al-Abade, told the peaceful crowd that Shiite religious leaders in Najaf would not accept American control of Iraq and that the only acceptable government in Iraq would be an Islamic government. He said the Shiites are prepared to use force, if necessary, to achieve this aim. The sheikh repeatedly condemned Western culture as a source of pollution that is tarnishing Islamic society.

"You must attack anything that is not good for Islam," he told the assembled gathering. "This is not terrorism because it is defending Islam."

As the leader spoke, two boys, roughly 10 years old, smiled at a Monitor reporter listening to the sermon. They both drew their first finger across their necks, as if they were wielding knives to cut a throat.

Update: June 10, 2003 - I don't know why, but this particular post is getting a lot of hits. In case this is the only post you ever read from my site, please be aware that all my comments on this disturbing issue are sarcastic. It pisses me off that this is happening and that we're going to be dealing with it for years down the road. It pisses me off more to see with hind sight that the Administration has absolutely no plans to deal with even the predictable, much less any worst case scenarios like the one above is pointing to.

Anyways, hope you enjoyed the read...

Tom is worried that we're getting bored with Baghdad - already. As may have been pointed out by those on the left before, this is not really something that anyone should have been surprised with. I think Tom just has a menu of crisis that he knows are going to play out, and he has a standard template for each. But I'd only really like to point out that this situation is going to suck.

I literally heard republican Senator Saxby Chambliss on Meet The Press proffer the meme that these "Al Qaida like" bombings "were planned for years, that are kind of in the pipeline." In the pipeline. Kind of rolls right off the tongue, don't it? Makes me feel safer already.

Another thing that struck me as interesting this week was the appearance of the meme that "everyone couldn't have been fooled about Iraqi WMD so it must be true". Various early forms emerged, but the one I heard proffered by democratic Congresswoman Jane Harman looks like the meme is stabilizing.

There was a strong intelligence case, Tim, that persuaded me and it was one of the reasons that I voted for the authorization for the use of force. If they are not there, then it was one of the greatest hoaxes in history and a huge miscalculation by Saddam.

But then, Saddam is still alive. Like that snake Ossama, living in a desert cave somewhere. Or in a dark labyrinth under the streets of Baghdad. Hasn't been brought to justice by the codpiece in chief.

And Tom thinks we're already bored with the whole deal. A viewpoint that would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic. After all, one of the popular "liberal hawk" arguments for going to war with Iraq was that we wouldn't have the staying power to make a draconian inspection regime actually work. We'd just get bored with it after a while. Sooner or later, the coalition of countries would break down and then Saddam would start up again. So we were reluctantly led to conclude that it's probably better to get rid of the guy rather than risk terrorists with WMD in the US homeland.

Yea, that'd be safer.

And I can remember a few liberals and those in the anti-war crowd consistently pointing out that this was entirely predictable. After all, we did just have an object lesson called Afghanistan that should have been fresh in our minds. How about that Opium crop?

But I can still hear the words echoing in my ears "It won't be like Afghanistan". After all, Iraq has an educated population. Secular tradition. Isn't Iraq turning to shit lately? Aren't there major political parties who want to install a religious state? Democratic, of course. Whoops. We're not going to let you have self rule just yet.

So yea, bored. Bored as heck. Can't seem to find any fires that are either burning out of control, or threatening to. Nothing to do. La ta dee ta dum. I think those tooth picks over there need straightening. Hmmm. That picture over there isn't quite level. There. That looks better. ............ Is there any lint on my shirt? Better brush that off. There. That's better.

BORED?

It's a complete abdication of responsibility, not boredom. It's only "boredom" in the way a debutante uses the word to describe a situation that has become too tedious. "Oh Butler! Come put this 1,000,000,000,000,000 piece puzzle together. I'm bored with it now". It's not "boring" in the traditional sense. It's just that the glorious future that we keep getting baited with keeps turning to shit. Everything.

We were told that we'd have a surplus. Gone. We were told that giving away 1.3 trillion dollars was going to get the surplus back. Gone. We were told that the Iraq war would make us safer from terrorism. Gone. 2.2 million jobs. Gone. 401K. Gone.

It's like Lisa Simpson chasing after a wad of cash in the gutter while Mr. Burns keeps yanking it away with the string he has tied to it. I mean, really. Why does anyone believe anything they are told will happen by this administration? It's like this is some Carnival ring toss game. You know it's impossible to fit the rings over the milk bottles, but you keep throwing cash away trying.

And I don't mean to imply, as Jonathan Chait would caution us to beware of, that everything the Administration says is a lie. On the contrary. These guys are experts. They just come right out and say what they're going to do and then just do it. It's simply stunning to witness.

But it's still a carny game. And no amount of skill is going to allow you to win the game. It's all rigged.

Tom's a good shill for the game. Kind of makes ya feel like you have a soul, worrying about all this human rights stuff. Gets the heart all pounding and a tear in the eye. Heady stuff with skulls n' stuff. Just like Shakespeare.

But really. Bored? Who'd of thought?

Found this through the looking glass post via Atrios. Besides the usual reactions of a liberal, my other observation is that that I think a lot of people on the "right" consistently identify truth with popularity and/or replication count. Seems like a dangerous and exploitable assumption on their part. Over and over I hear truth being equated with polling numbers and/or market share.

Swamping the field is certainly an effective pattern for attack. Shock n' awe so to speak. But I think it's interesting to note that this form of combat is called "effects based" for a reason.

But I'm thankful for their insight, justifications and explanations.

God, I love the Horse.

But we have all witnessed over the last decade the consequences of our being pathologically "not like them" and their being relentlessly "like them": the unprecedented abuses of power involved in the "impeachment" and near-removal of a legitimately elected president; the theft of a national election in broad daylight; the ramming through of an agenda rejected by the American people in that stolen election; the total loss of US credibility worldwide as a result of the incompetence and arrogance of the illegitimate regime that stole the election - and the complete absence of media accountability for any of the above.

Turn on a national "news" network and you will find the right openly advocating bludgeoning US senators who are their political opponents with tire irons, while "mainstream" talk show hosts like Chris Matthews sit by and chuckle.

We contend that there are few if any tactics remaining the left is not justified in employing these days. We're at war.

But quite frankly, the Horse has a point.

John Fund admits he was part of the effort to smear Sidney BlumentAzael by peddling the lie that Mr. BlumentAzael had abused his wife. As far as we're concerned, Fund finding himself subject of the same allegations is not only fair and just, but beautifully and practically divinely so, regardless of the accuracy of the charges he faces.

A demon's resume.

I know you've seen it before, but after reading all this... I don't know. My only explanation is that we're under alien attack. The only explanation that makes sense is Alien colonists.

Stick with me. I know it sounds weird at first.

When the land mass of what is now the continental United States was being colonized, the would be colonizer's primary strategy was one of divide and conquer. Everybody always has grudge against somebody. So, you sell arms to the ones you can sway to your side. These guys start slamming on the other tribes and you have a force multiplier - instant troops. Done intelligently, you can decimate a large indigenous population and bring them to heel.

Imagine that there are intelligent species out there with space travel. And let's just say that the speed of light limit holds and there are no Star Trek fantasy futures. In that case, any invading alien colonists would have the supply line of doom. Back in the 1600's it took months to get ships across to the new colonies. Our theoretical aliens could have decades, if not hundreds of years long supply lines.

Everyone expects invading aliens to be more advanced than we are in every way. I think that it's far more likely that they may only be more advanced than us in space travel, and maybe behind us in several important fields - say, like Genetics. They may have evolved in an environment without major diseases or such. So it never occurred to them to look closely at it. Rather they didn't have the same in fighting between their own internal populations, so they cooperated on a massive enough scale to develop space colonization technology. Maybe they have highly developed analog computers and no digital technology.

The point is, there's a lot of plausible scenarios along this line.

So if you were an alien with different technological advantages than the indigenous species and you had a 350 year long supply line, how would you colonize the planet and take over?

I think the other explanation is just as wacky. It certainly explains why this Administration is bankrupting the US while using the vastly overpowered military to disrupt the other major powers. Injecting instability right into the very heart of the middle east. Shredding alliances. Destroying international institutions. Did I mention the economic self destruction? It's as if the entire economy is being funneled into the most inefficient use - war and fruits of war. No recognition of the simultaneous bankruptcy of all 50 states of the union.

Or is the Administration just completely composed of buffoons who won't even do something that they need to do to get reelected? It's just the common wisdom, after all. Maybe they really do have the electronic voting machines rigged in their favor or they really believe that everyone will vote for them despite the economic, military and intelligence failures. I mean, if Bill Clinton or Al Gore was looking at no WMD, 2.2 million jobs lost, 50 million without health care, record deficits... Well, I would have thought it would be political suicide. It should be the most laughable presidential race in history.

But for some unknown reason, he's as popular as ever. Still no investigations. Still nothing sticking to the Administration. Still the entire media on bended knee. Has every expectation of winning in 2004.

Takes some 'splaining in my irrelevant opinion.

And I think an Alien colonization is as good an explanation as the alternatives.

Well, just a Tiffin fantasy of my own.

Andrew Sullivan says you should vote democratic in 2004

THE MESS IN IRAQ: All the signs are pointing to a serious screw-up. Patience is one thing. But the reporting from the country, including this devastating account from a pro-war writer, suggests that the state of affairs there is spiraling out of control. Even if the voters won't punish Bush for finding no WMDs, they sure as hell will hold him responsible if Iraq collapses into chaos or civil war. And they should.

Suicide Bombs Kill Dozens in Casablanca

41 dead. 100 wounded. 10 terrorists. Synchronized attacks.

Are you safer than you were before the Iraq war?

Speaking of the Jayson Blair NY Times scandal, doesn't anyone in the press remember the other Blair plagiarism and false reporting scandal?

It happened back in February. This time it was Tony Blair and British intelligence. Don't ya remember how they plagiarized Al-Marashi's work?

I guess it is true that they have different legal standards in the UK. I guess if Colin Powell holds it up in front of the world, it's okay. It's only when it happens in a liberal biased news paper that we really care about such important matters. After all, all the claims in the "fine" intelligence report were true, right?

Are you safer than you were 4 years ago?

(heh) I find the above post very encouraging. Rather than dispute the facts of Krugman's excellent column, Bevan pulls out poll after poll to show how nobody believes Krugman's charges. As if reality was determined by a poll. "See, everyone believes this lie, therefore it must be true". Well, yea. That's how they may vote, but it doesn't make it true. It just means that you're doing pretty darn good job at fooling the right people most of the time.

The idea that the Bush administration went to war for a photo-op and doesn't care about fighting al-Qaeda stretches the boundaries of both cynicism and reality.

First, let's acknowledge that this new argument flies in the face of what Krugman and the rest of the Dems have been saying for the past eighteen months, namely that Bush has been too preoccupied with the War on Terror to deal with domestic issues in any real way.

No, the point is that it is quite clear now to pretty much everyone that the Iraq war didn't really accomplish all that much - if anything - in prosecuting the "war on terror". Not only was it weaker than anyone expected militarily (except the hawks, who did predict this), Iraq does not have even a whiff of WMD. And given that Hezbollah is setting up offices in Baghdad, and the whole Saudi suicide bomber thing... Well, personally I'm scratching my head and wondering why the hell did we do this?

Now you can join the world of sweetness and light of Tom Friedman and just believe that the massacre of Iraqis over 10 years ago was worth the prosecution of this war. Tom believes that we don't need to show a causus bellum, because he's seen the skulls. And I guess there's a lot of people out there that believes this justifies all this. But it really isn't fighting the war on terror. Without WMDs, dispersal drones that "can fit into a suit case", or major terrorist ties there's pretty much no "war on terror" benefit. None.

And quite frankly, that really can't make us any safer at all. Given the fact that we're now reneging on previous promises of a quick transition to self rule, it's starting to look like we could have indeed inherited our own Palestine. I'm not predicting suicide bombers, but heck the feyadeen seemed to start suicide bombing pretty quick in the war. And wasn't there all those "suicide bomber jackets" we found in the war? Could get pretty ugly.

In any event, Iraq certainly isn't the Libertarian love fest of self policing and economic free market paradise wrapped in a liberal democracy bow we were all promised. Iraqi resentment is going to rise even if it doesn't result in suicide bombing. And resentment really does increase the number of potential terrorists that the radical Islamists - say Hezbollah who have convenient offices in Baghdad - can recruit and turn into really nasty people. Dangerous people.

So if you're asking the question "are you safer than you were 4 years ago?", I think it's pretty safe to say that "no, we're really not". We're not a heck of a lot safer now than we were 4 years ago. In fact, we are likely worse off, because we fought a war based on Tiffin phantasms of WMD. Even worse, we shredded alliances with the very countries that we're going to need cooperation from in combating terrorism. So that was really smart, wasn't it? Then there's the whole occupation thing. Really good show that, old boy. I'm sure all those countries we've been berating are just itching to help us out with the whole occupation thing.

I certainly can agree that the Bush administration has spent a heck of a lot of energy on the "war on terror". Unfortunately, we really needed a "police action" on terror and not another war. And spending a lot of energy doing the wrong thing is inherently stupid at best. At worst, you can actually destroy things that you really need to do the real job (like international alliances). Or you can do other, incidental damage to surrounding things like - say - our Constitution, or silly things like a free press. Or democratic debate. You know. The little things.

So which do you prefer? A blustering buffoon who shoots first and asks questions later or someone who will think twice before doing anything stupid. How about someone who will truly learn from the mistakes that led to 9/11 and take the time to do the hard work of really making sure the homeland is secure without turning us into a police state? How about someone who wouldn't be led around by the nose by the neocon cabal's WMD illusion? How about an attorney general who doesn't cover up Justice because of his puritanical beliefs? Maybe an administration that isn't the most secretive in history? How about a little transparency in our government, not just in corporate America?

Yea, GW is likely going to win. But it will be because they did a really good job of convincing everyone they did a really good job. Not because they really did do a great job.

See? We won the war! Still a dangerous place and rest assured we will find out what happened to those WMDs, but hey! We won the war! Look at that Codpiece! What democratic candidate could fill out a flight suit like GW? Did we mention we won the war?

Timeline of fools

Quiddity gives us a nice table outlining the... uh... misemphasis on WMD that led up to this war.

Where Are the WMDs

It is likely that if Saddam no longer had a WMD program he did not know it. Why else would he endure over a decade of crippling sanctions? If Saddam had ended his quest for WMDs, it would have been in his best interest to open the doors wide and let the world see. By playing as the model citizen he would have regained control of his oil wealth and quickly been able to make Iraq a regional superpower again.

Instead, his henchmen did everything possible to obfuscate the true WMD picture and to thwart any inspection teams. If they had nothing to hide, they sure worked hard at trying to hide it. What if they were not just hiding a possible WMD program from inspectors, but also hiding from Saddam the fact that no such program existed?

I mean, really. If you really do believe this - and it certainly is a possibility - then you have to explain the complete and total incompetence of our intelligence agencies and this administration in believing these pack of jokers.

Liar, Liar, pants on fire.

Face it. You hopped up the evidence. You lied.

Now you're just trying desperately to cover your asses.

Bastards.

heh. I love how this is playing out.

Now, if you're Lincoln and you're reading an article about how the White House is so determined to oust you that it's willing to draft a top official from the Department of Homeland Security to run against you--despite the obvious flack about shortchanging homeland security for politics that this would inevitably create--and, what's more, you're reading this on the same day that the same White House is assuring reporters you're going to vote its way despite your clearly-stated reluctance to do so, how on earth could you trust anything that comes out of the mouth of any White House official?

Okay, I know there's this whole democratic solidarity thing, but do I really have to vote for Smoking Joe Liberman in the national election?

They rule.

Steve makes the point that even though resurgence of terrorism is a real problem and does indeed show the failings of this three stooges approach to dealing with it, Bush can still benefit from it. Riding the wave of terrorism on his white steed (Air Force One).

The Great Oz is powerful and long is his vision.

Silvan sees the violence inherent in the system. I know it's a cheap Monty Python joke, but it's funny for a reason. I mean, just look at all the moralizing going on. I just watched Bob Dornnan froth at the mouth like a rabid wolf about John Kennedy's affair with an intern for about 5 minutes. It was amazing.

Clearly a feedback cycle is in play. It's going to get really ugly out there.

In any event, I think it's really silly to equate "merely wanting to discuss the effects of viewing violence" with "censorship". Not all things are appropriate for the young. They are young and impressionable, after all. I don't think it's black and white.

It's like guns. If we could get a system where real gun enthusiasts could have a "safe" place to pursue their hobby, everything would be just ducky. At issue is all the others out there who run guns from unregulated gun sales. It's the really large number of people who use them to kill and commit crimes.

To ignore that - well - a lot of violence is done with illegal guns is to be a complete moron. To proclaim that it must remain completely unregulated in some libertarian free market love fest totally ignores the power that guns really do have.

It's this "or" logic which really sucks. It's either "complete, unregulated freedom" or a "Stalinist oppressive state". It just freaks me out and it's crystal clear that it's an incredibly naive viewpoint to hold.

Even a frickin' Steam Engine has a regulation mechanism. It's tiny and prevents the engine from flying apart.

All complicated things have regulation. It's just the way life is. It should be small, and effective. It should also be adaptable and adjustable by people who know what they are doing and have the authority to do it.

To believe otherwise - just my opinion - is simply intellectually dishonest.

The question is not whether to regulate, it's "how to design the regulation mechanism so it works and is as small and unburdensome as possible".

A little bit more about the media. I don't believe in the urban myth about liberal bias. I have never seen any credible evidence for it, other than picayune incidents that would make Bill Clinton blush. Having said that, I don't believe the opposite, either. What I do believe is that the media has the bias of whomever pays the bills. They're capitalists. And the right has a lot of money. So just by free market mechanisms, they have a right bias. This can easily change. They're just out to make money and all you have to do is figure out how you can make them more money and get your message out.

Regardless of the political bent of the bias, the system is extremely screwed. I don't think that something like the news media should be a completely free market. Unlike, say, Soap, it's not the market's sole choice to determine what news they want to hear. Because the world is a very dangerous place, there's going to be a lot of news that we simply would rather not hear. And that's just the way things are. We must hear things that we don't agree with. We must listen to people who disagree with us.

Believing that the news media should be a completely unregulated market where anything goes is to simply be intellectually dishonest - at best. Personally, I just think you're a fool who's not seeing the implications of an information market where we only serve the lowest common denominator.

And it's truly a stupid idea to increase media ownership concentration. Small numbers of players only makes it more likely to be manipulated. Resistance to propaganda and manipulation by the government - regardless of the political affiliation - is only assured when there is a robust population of scrappy investigative reporters. I can't for the life of me understand why those who worship at the feet of free market and competition want to implement rules which would limit these ideals.

Sometimes more freedom does not ensure a better system. Sometimes structure is darn useful.

I'm listening to Bob Dornan foam at the mouth on CrossFire. It's simply amazing. Even Tucker Carlson is pretty disgusted with it. I guess he needed to pay the bills, so the Great Oz Production picked him up on retainer.

Clearly another fault line. Bob clearly is just a good actor. It's clear he doesn't believe the crap he's spewing about John Kennedy (at the moment). At some level, there's still a 12 year old kid inside of Dornan who is pretty horrified of the individual he has become. It's embarrassing and humiliating.

As per Eric's request, check out the TomPaine blog.

Wired to the Brain of a Rat, a Robot Takes On the World

This is what I likely thought was going to happen. Basically, AI is a heck of a long way off. Enter biology. Cyborgs. It's a trivial and quick way to solve the entire problem. Bio-robots will quickly take off, zinging way past the ethical issues they raise.

Well, just my prediction. After all, who would have thought that someone would seriously propose opening up a crack to the center of the earth with nuclear bombs?

The nerve center of a conventional robot is a microprocessor of silicon and metal. But for a robot under development at Georgia Tech, commands are relayed by 2,000 or so cells from a rat's brain.

A group led by a university researcher has created a part mechanical, part biological robot that operates on the basis of the neural activity of rat brain cells grown in a dish. The neural signals are analyzed by a computer that looks for patterns emitted by the brain cells and then translates those patterns into robotic movement. If the neurons fire a certain way, for example, the robot's right wheel rotates once.

The leader of the group, Steve M. Potter, a professor in the Laboratory for Neuroengineering at Georgia Tech, calls his creation a Hybrot, short for hybrid robot.

"It's very much a symbiosis," he said, "a digital computer and a living neural network working together."

Just a bit more on the last post.

First, by a constant non-stop attack on a myriad of issues that we have grudges against this administration, we accomplish several things. First is getting the message out. Like it or not, America has a 20 second attention span. This works to our advantage. Issues will rise and fall as the attention by the media waxes and wanes. The point is not to make any particular issue the center piece of the democratic party. No. It's to make the attack non stop. The moment issue X fades from the media, it is replaced by issue Y. And they will love it. The media is driven by this "issue of the minute" nonsense and they are constantly searching and digging up anything they can potentially make into headlines. So, a distributed attack by millions of angry democrats about thousands of issues will make the media play into our hands.

Second, by taking the initiative on the "issue of the minute" and having a constant, non-stop supply of these issues, the Administration - and Karl Rove in particular - will have to answer each and every one. The control of the narrative will simply evaporate from their twisted fingers. Right now they are winning because they control the debate. Simply by pounding them with the collective grievances of the entire population will use their own media lackeys against them. This will neuter their very real and very devastating power that comes from centralized planning and issue management. They can't have a talking point for everything. They want to control what is talked about so their carefully crafted talking points can have the effect they have calculated.

Third, by having a constantly shifting attack based on the myriad of grievances we have with this Administration, we have a far better chance at reaching the center. Some of these issues will start to stick with a large percentage of the centrist voter. When their fire station down the street closes down because of no money, they're going to start remembering who was attacking the Administration for their callous shirking of their responsibilities to the infrastructure of this country. When they fail to turn up a whiff of WMD in Iraq, and they see the chaos and, more importantly, the astounding amount of money they are spending to rebuild Iraq, they'll remember who was on the other side of the debate and who raised questions. When they see the terrorist attacks continue, they'll remember who was fighting hard to bring out the truth about what happened on 9/11 and who is fighting to keep any report on what went wrong classified. People have a 20 second attention span, but everyone has something that sticks in their craw.

Lastly, another facet on point #2 above is that Karl Rove cannot attack what isn't there. By shifting the debate between very real issues - and we've got millions of them - they can't force a wedge in the party. They start questioning your patriotism, then start attacking them on releasing the 9/11 report. They start talking about defense, then start bringing up the fact that it was Clinton's military that kicked Iraq's ass - not this Administration. They start talking about tax cuts, then slap them back with the budget surpluses of Clinton. Shift, fade and disappear. Reappear with a completely different issue and go on the attack.

It can be devastating if every democrat starts doing it.

The real issues that Josh MarsAzaell and others bring up - i.e. a coherent party platform strong on defense and other vital issues - will come from the party leaders and policy wonks. The people in the leadership will look at the myriad of issues we're raising in the attacks and see which ones are sticking. New talking points will be issued and we'll find out where the attacks should be concentrated. They'll come up with a coherent party platform. Don't worry. That's their jobs. However, it is our job to provide distributed, constant, and withering attacks at every opportunity we have against these jokers.

And it's so easy to do.

Stealth Fighters

George W. Bush hopped aboard Air Force One and flew out to New Mexico, Nebraska and kindred pressure-point states to hawk his new tax cuts just days after the administration announced that another plane, this one flying from Baghdad back to the states, would ferry home Task Force 75, the military unit in charge of finding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The task force grumpily packed its bags, having scoured the landscape for several weeks and unearthed mostly fertilizer.

What, aside from aviation, do these two developments have in common? Plenty, it turns out. Both are vivid representations of this administration's dishonest modus operandi, which is to proclaim that the goal is X when it's really Z, then construct arguments around X that make it sound as if anyone who's against it is against hot dogs on the Fourth of July. It works, too, and if the Democrats are going to have a chance next year, they need to find ways to get out of the box Karl Rove wants to put them in and reframe the arguments.

Digby echoed what I said in my previous post with a far superior piece.

Karl Rove knows that his biggest problem is that his party’s philosophy is completely incoherent. If he can keep people focused on Bush’s codpiece and fear (or fear of Bush’s codpiece), he can eke out a victory. The Democrats have to attack along all of his fault lines. This is one of them.

As I see it, there is very little hope in duplicating the strategies that the right has used against the democrats. Over and over we hear stories about getting our own real Liberal radio talk shows up and started. Somehow we're going to take back the media and get our message out. While I applaud these efforts, I think that they are long term strategies that are not the tactical solutions that we need to win in 2004. These kinds of long term strategies are absolutely essential to maintaining a liberal majority as we move forward, but they won't do anything about 2004. And by essential, I do mean essential. They are strategies that must be implemented (or something like them). As history has constantly shown, the moment that the democrats are in power, they start descending on each other like a pack of wolves, tearing themselves to pieces. A replay of this kind of crap will only ensure that if we win in 2004, the NeoCons will be right back in 2006 far stronger and with more ammunition. We have to be ready for success.

But having said that, what are some of the tactics that democrats can use to win in 2004.

My opinion is that we simply turn all of our weaknesses into strengths. One of the things that democrats have in abundance is a completely distributed organizational structure. As has been pointed out repeatedly by friend and foe, the democratic party is just a loose affiliation of a heck of a lot of special interest groups. Right now, this is being used against us. Forcing us to fight each other. Rove is an expert at exploiting this and it's really just a simple strategy - Divide and Conquer. But this can be turned on its head and used against them. Over and over, democrats have tried to organize themselves on a massive scale. Large scale protests, letter writing campaigns... you name it. The only large scale organized thing that we really need to do is simply vote. On the more smaller scale, all we simply need to do is to take our particular grievances - whatever they are - and just focus on this Administration as the object of our grievance. Whatever it is. Blame this Administration. Go out of your way to ridicule and deride them.

I'm not talking about becoming the enemy here. I'm not saying that we should descend into demagoguery and pure propaganda. I'm just saying that you should all take your very real and very heartfelt grievances with the shitty shape the world is in and start to let them have it. Reach deep into your soul and hold the anger/betrayal/worry/fear close to you and focus it entirely on this Administration. Just absolutely forget about attacking any democrats for now. I'm sure there will be plenty of time for that after we've won.

Talk about it constantly with your friends and associates at work. Get in their face about the idiocy that is going on - whatever facet of idiocy you find most offensive. Just up and laugh whenever anyone tries to support this Administration's unsupportable positions. Just laugh. Laugh at the complete insanity of the media reporting and laugh at the silliness that one has to have to actually believe what they are saying.

And then start writing letters/email/faxes and telephoning everyone you know in elected offices. I don't really care what you write or say. Just remember. Focus the entire sum of your hatred/fear/anger/betrayal on this Administration. For the next year or so, just stop trying to see all sides of the argument and ignore the overwhelming urge to be fair. I'm not saying to lie to yourself. All I'm saying is that you need to remember that any crack you show in our exterior is going to be wedged open wide by a 15 ton pile driver operated by Karl Rove. And you have to keep that image absolutely crystal clear. So don't give them any opportunities. Don't forget your differences with the rest of the democrats. Just remember your common goals.

When the wedge is inserted and the overwhelming pressure starts, simply fade away. Remember, there's a zillion issues that are just completely being screwed up/over by this administration. See something becoming a wedge with your fellow democrats? See them using your own words against other liberals? Just change your tune and fade away. It's okay. You're not going to forget about it. Just pick another topic and start bitching and moaning about that.

This is how a distributed and decentralized system fights a centralized system. Anywhere they start to make ground, the issue disappears. But the attack is non-stop because it is constant from all sides.

Anyways, just my incoherent and irrelevant thoughts on the matter.

The Great Oz is indeed powerful. But they aren't unbeatable. And in fact, they are susceptible to the very attacks that democrats can quite effectively make use of.

Okay, the bounce over a couple of hyper connected blogs linking to me seems to have passed.

We now continue with our regularly scheduled haranguings and tirades.

Bush Officials Change Tune on Iraqi Weapons

The Bush administration has changed its tune on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the reason it went to war there. Instead of looking for vast stocks of banned materials, it is now pinning its hopes on finding documentary evidence.

The change in rhetoric, apparently designed in part to dampen public expectations, has unfolded gradually in the past month as special U.S. military teams have found little to justify the administration's claim that Iraq was concealing vast stocks of chemical and biological agents and was actively working on a covert nuclear weapons program.

"The administration seems to be hoping that inconvenient facts will disappear from the public discourse. It's happening to a large degree," said Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Police Studies, a liberal think-tank which opposed the war.

One step forward, two steps back.

Josh tells a little tale of Wolfowitz in Turkey.

In other words, Turkey is currently struggling to accomplish something very similar to what we’re trying to demonstrate in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East: that pluralism, democracy and Islam can peaceably coexist. It doesn’t say much for our sincerity or seriousness if we push the generals to step in the moment we can’t get the elected government to do our bidding. (It’s not even shrewd politics since the Turkish military had its own reasons for resisting our plans for Iraq.)

There’s nothing special about saying you want democracy. The real question is whether you still want democracies —- full-fledged, multi-party, rule-of-law democracies —- even when they disagree with you. If the U.S. is serious about spreading democracy in the Middle East, that’s a question we’ll have to confront again and again. Paul Wolfowitz’s comments leave his answer to that question in serious doubt.

I mean, how many times do you have to get slapped in the face before you just take them at their word?

Hey, remember this?

We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.
— U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, U.S. representative to the International Conference on Military Trials, Aug. 12, 1945.

Decided to post this instead of cluttering up someone's already long comment thread.

As part of the anti-war crowd, sure. I'm really glad Saddam is out of there. Absolutely ecstatic by it. But the position you're trying to get me to agree with is that the liberation of Iraq was worth the price we paid to liberate them.

It's amazing to see people who consistently berate environmentalists, human rights activists and other panty waisted liberals over cost/benefit analysis now seeming so quick to tick up the benefits without any accounting of the cost.

Okay, let us just say that the liberation of the people of Iraq was worth a war. The question any libertarian worth the name should ask is what's the cost?

So far, the short list is:

1) The UN
2) NATO
3) International Alliances
4) Doctrine of the prohibition of preemptive war
5) Article 1 section 8 of our constitution
6) "treasure" (as Powell puts it) meaning the actual dollar cost of the war and occupation

I'd add "democratic debate" to the list, but that's theoretically what this kind of discussion is all about.

Now, there's no requirement for anyone pro-war to agree with my list of the costs of this war. But part of the problem is that the pro-war crowd seems to ridicule points #1-3 as products of cheese eating surrender monkeys.

Point #4 is waved away with the "imminent threat" argument, based on the theory of WMD.

Point #5 is waved away with arguments - based on the WMD theory - that the president has a right to defend our nation against immanent threats.

Point #6 is waved away with an argument that "whatever the price will be, it's smaller than the benefits of a liberated Iraq".

So, go ahead and trivialize points 1#-3. No biggie. You're the loudest and the majority. You don't have to hold these things as important.

But point #4 seems pretty screwed by not finding even a whiff of WMD so far. Which means that point #5 was a pretty fallacious argument, as there was no imminent threat. And as to point #6, the cost of this war so far is a non-trivial amount of money. Since the Administration refuses to even estimate it - i.e. it's unbounded - then I guess we should be just expecting unbounded benefits from a liberated Iraq. And so far, considering the fundamentalist Islamics and well... just general lawlessness and cholera... it's looking to be quite a bill.

So, sorry to be a person who cares about liberating humans from brutal dictators but wonders at what cost. It's my old libertarian ways coming through. But as the right has consistently pointed out, there has to be a cost to benefit analysis for even the liberation of the people of Iraq.

And you better darn well produce some WMD, or you just screwed us royally. And I'm sorry if I'm just a bit more selfish about my own country's liberties and constitutional foundation than I am regarding the Iraqi's.

What about Ethiopia? Hmmm.... Seems like all the right wingers who supported the war who are now bashing the anti-war crowd over a decade old mass killing should be all over this issue.

Oh wait. I remember. They are only using humanitarian issues as a bludgeon. They don't really care about people dying, only using deaths to justify - ex post facto - their war. Guess the Ethiopians will have to wait.

Just a quick point about Saddam's "killing fields". As per standard operating procedure, this is being used to bludgeon the anti-war crowd. What's odd about it is that the approximate number killed has been known for over a decade now - after all, the killings occurred in '91 - and I can't recall any republicans getting their panties in a twist about it, ready to invade the country. It's just plain surreal to hear them now bludgeon us over the head over something that human rights activists screamed about long ago.

But that is just the fashion of the day, I guess.

Heck, even Andrew Sullivan is starting to get worried about WMD. More specifically, about the glaring lack thereof.

The New York Times poll today must be welcome in the White House. Most people, like me, still find this president strong, likable, and focused. But there are two issues on which, in my opinion, the administration is in some denial about its vulnerability. The first is the question of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Where are they? It's possible they have been destroyed, or smuggled out, or sold. It's possible the program was far less ready-to-go than we were led to believe. But we were led to believe that there were large quantities of dangerous materials that posed an imminent threat. If they are not found, the public needs an explanation. We need to be told what exactly, for example, was true in Colin Powell's December address to the U.N., and what was not. We need to know that we were not deceived or that the intelligence services are not wildly incompetent or politically manipulable. I don't know the answer; but I do know we need one. Personally, I support the war more fervently now for humanitarian and broader security reasons. But that's beside the point. Was Powell accurate? If not, why not? I understand if a definitive answer to that is not yet available, but that's not a reason to defer or forget the question.

Interesting

Self-examination is healthy but self-absorption is not; self-correction is a winner but self-flagellation is a sure loser. Let us slap a metaphoric cold steak over our huge black eye and learn from this dismaying example — so that other journalists in the nation and around the world can continue to learn from ours.

DR Congo's latest flashpoint

The head of United Nations peacekeeping operations, Jean-Marie Guehenno, has warned that there could be a bloodbath in the town of Bunia, in north-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, unless decisive action is taken.

He, along with some African leaders, wants the United Nations Security Council to send extra peacekeeping troops to the area around Bunia, where brutal ethnic fighting continues.

Here's a situation that's about to explode. A desperate situation.

Where's Tom Friedman now? Where's Andrew Sullivan now? Where's the famed humanitarian, InstaPundit now?

Oh wait. They're too busy to care. It's only countries with oil and strategic positions in the middle east that deserve our humanitarian side.

Pack of jokers.

Attacks to Prompt Review of Antiterror Efforts

Okay, just a few select quotes from this article.

The Saudi attacks came in seeming defiance of the undeniable progress made against terror groups and their sponsors: the severe damage wreaked on Al Qaeda by the Afghanistan war, the arrests or killing of some of that group's top figures, the financial and legal pressures applied by scores of countries, and the indirect pressure represented by American willingness to wage war with a country, Iraq, that it accused of supporting terrorists.

In London, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said in an annual report, coincidentally issued today, that Al Qaeda was "now reconstituted" in a form "more insidious and just as dangerous as in its pre-11 September incarnation."

Let me put it this way. Our "war against terror" is exactly like looking for your keys under the street lamp, even though you lost them in a dark alley. Just because we have the biggest, baddest military does not mean we have to turn a police action into a war. It's just not going to solve the problem.

But then, the anti-war crowd has been saying this all along, and no one has listened - in fact, they have been heaping scorn upon us.

So, who we going to bomb this time, eh? What country is now on the list of hosts for Al Qaeda?

Graham: Saudi bombings 'could have been avoided'

Sen. Bob Graham, a Democratic presidential candidate, accused the Bush administration Tuesday of laxity in the war on terror, and said its failure to dismantle al Qaeda contributed to the deadly attack against U.S. citizens in Saudi Arabia.

"It could have been avoided if you had actually crushed the basic infrastructure of al Qaeda," said Graham, repeating his long-standing criticism that the Bush administration should not have gone to war with Iraq until al Qaeda and other terror groups had been properly dismantled.

Well, I for one am glad that the whole NY-Times/Blair thing happened. Andrew Sullivan has been blogging non stop about it, and anything that keeps his twisted fingers from posting about anything else is fine by me.

War may have spread HIV

Scientists believe a form of HIV probably entered the human population in Africa at least 60 years ago - and that war helped it spread.

Although HIV is usually spoken of as one virus, in fact it comes in two distinct types, HIV-1 and HIV-2.

HIV-1 came from chimpanzees, and has spread globally; but HIV-2, which came from sootey mangabey monkeys, has remained concentrated in west Africa, where it infects approximately 1% of the population.

A team of international researchers has calculated that HIV-2 crossed to humans sometime between 1890 and 1940 - probably shortly after HIV-1 made the same leap.

The researchers also made a detailed study of how HIV-2 spread within Guinea-Bissau.

They conclude it remained a low-level infection for many years, only spreading widely in the 1960s - a period which co-incided with the country's war to gain independence from Portugal.

Portuguese soldiers who had fought in the war were the first Europeans to contract HIV-2.

The scientists say that a number of factors prevalent in wartime - such as mass immunisations with unsterilised needles - could have helped the virus spread rapidly.

Schools must prove prayer policy to feds

Threatened with the loss of federal money, the vast majority of the nation's schools have declared that they allow prayer wherever and however the Constitution permits.

For the first time, federal law requires school districts to prove that they have no policy stifling court-protected prayer by students or teachers. Those that don't comply risk losing a share of elementary and secondary school money totaling $23 billion.

Al-Qaida Operative Warned of Attacks

An al-Qaida commander warned that the terror network was about to carry out major attacks in Saudi Arabia in an e-mail just a day before the deadly assault in the Saudi capital, an Arab magazine reported.

The al-Qaida operative, who identified himself as Abu Mohammed al-Ablaj, wrote in an e-mail Sunday to the London-based Al-Majalla magazine that al-Qaida has stored arms and explosives and set up "martyrdom" squads in Saudi Arabia to launch what he described as a "guerrilla war" on its leaders and the United States.

A U.S. counterterrorism official in Washington said the e-mail is regarded as credible and implies al-Qaida responsibility for Monday night's attacks.
...
Beside targeting the heart of America, among the strategic priorities now is to target and execute operations in the Gulf countries and allies of the United States, particularly Egypt and Jordan," Al-Ablaj wrote in the e-mail.

"The list of assassinations, the raid teams and the martyr operation squads are ready. The caches of weapons, ammunition, explosives and bombs are plentiful, and the authorities cannot uncover them," al-Ablaj wrote, according to the magazine. "We will start by creating tensions to confuse the security services, then carry out major operations and letAzael strikes."

Bin Qais was quoted as saying the arrests of key al-Qaida figures, including suspected Sept. 11 mastermind KAzaelid Sheikh Mohammed, would have little effect on the organization because of newcomers "who have a very good security cover."

Bush vows bombers will learn 'meaning of American justice'

I guess that's the same justice that got Ossama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Look. I don't really want to rub this Saudi bombing in anyone's collective nose. It's a horrific tragedy that shows terrorists are not a state. You can't go to war with them. They're everywhere. The have no allegiance to a state.

That's why terrorism is a POLICE issue, not a MILITARY issue. When we had a problem with organized crime, we made it a police issue. We didn't crack open the military box and send them trundling off to Italy, did we? Of course not. Only a fool would have done that. But when we get blasted by 19 terrorists, what did we do? Bomb Afghanistan and then took over Iraq. Has this made us any safer? Of course not. It's only pissed them off more.

According to reports, Al Qaeda is already regrouping in Afghanistan and the border area with Pakistan. Why? Well, because we just bombed Afghanistan and left for the next government we wanted to overthrow.

"These despicable acts were committed by killers whose only faith is hate and the United States will find the killers and they will learn the meaning of American justice," Bush said.

"Anytime anybody attacks our homeland, or our fellow citizens, we will be on the hunt," he added. "We will bring them to justice."

"Just ask the Taliban," Bush added, recalling the U.S. victory over the Taliban government of Afghanistan.

Russian Defence Minister, Sergie Ivanov has warned against recent threat of regrouping of Taliban in Afghanistan.

He expressed these views at a press conference in Stockholm after talks with his Swedish counterpart.

He said that Afghanistan was ignored due to Iraq war. According to him war against terrorism was also ignored and Taliban were not eliminated but rather they were further encouraged and have intensified their activities.

He maintained that sadly terrorist activities, attacks and explosions are increasing in Afghanistan.

Well, everyone is all a twitter about the Saudi bombings. Al Qaeda, they are certain. On the way into work today I was listening to Morning Edition on that commie liberal Saddam coddling public radio station here in the SF bay area, and they were interviewing someone - can't remember who - about the bombing. He said something very interesting. He said it was likely the work of local terrorists, but that they were "influenced" by Al Qaeda. Influenced.

So, given the fact that Iraq isn't a bed of roses like we were told, given that there is now a strong fundamentalist Islamic movement quickly filling the power vacuum, given that we're now on our second installed regime in Iraq, given that we've found absolutely no WMD so far, and given that we seem to have kicked Al Qaeda out of its slumber... Well, can we all at least admit that the anti-war crowd may have been right about something?

I mean, really. So far, the only thing that the pro-war crowd can crow about is a cakewalk war. That is literally the only thing they seem to have gotten right. The one and only thing.

War was quick. Aftermath lasts forever.

So I have to ask again, why did we do this? Why did we have to completely eviscerate the UN? Why did we have to shred practically all our alliances? Why did we have to wage a preemptive war - contrary to all the treaties we signed outlawing it - against such a wimpy, isolated desert state? Huh?

Sorry, just a rehash of my previous rant on the subject.

But I do wish I could extract some payment from all the people who supported this war for the "right reasons".

I'm getting so sick and tired of actual, real constitutional issues being spun like whirling dervishes in a sand storm. Just once I'd actually like everyone who supported this war to admit that...........

Heck, what am I talking about? I know that they'll never admit anything other than that they were always right, regardless of their consistent and constant flopping around like a fish out of water.

Yes, this was just a shameless post to get you to read some of my other posts. Shameless is my middle name.

Since I'm getting a huge and undoubtedly short lived boost due to links for my WMD scoreboard, let me shill for some excellent blogs you might not have seen yet:

BigPicnic
Busy,Busy,Busy
BradDeLong
CalPundit
Gorilla-a-gogo
Hullabaloo
LiberalOasis
Orcinus
PoliZen - Doghouse
NewCentury OfFreedom
Uggabugga
WeWriteTo TasteLifeTwice

The China Syndrome

Krugman channels Noam Chomsky.

And the implicit trading surely extends to news content. Imagine a TV news executive considering whether to run a major story that might damage the Bush administration — say, a follow-up on Senator Bob Graham's charge that a Congressional report on Sept. 11 has been kept classified because it would raise embarrassing questions about the administration's performance. Surely it would occur to that executive that the administration could punish any network running that story.

Clash of the political titans

Everyone's making a big deal of this. But as I've said before, I think Powell's role in this government is to be the "Brer Rabbit". Call me cynical (and I have, mind you), but I think that Rove found the Good Cop/Bad Cop act of Powell and Rummy so effective during the Iraq war that they're just sticking with success. Everyone who has a soul clings to Powell like some innocent clings to the good cop in an interrogation room. Then, WHAM! He turns and you turn with him and then... Another glorious victory for the Homeland.

Heck, I'm likely wrong. But it just seems more than a little bit suspicious. It is following the exact same pattern and I can just guess the outcome of this. Powell will get fed up with some trivial thing again - as a matter of honor - and then come swooping down to roost in the hawk's nest. He'll pull in all the faux centrists and a heck of a lot of the "deer in the headlight" liberals with him.

The Great Oz is powerful. Long is his vision.

Tennessee School District Sued Over Ties to Evangelistic Crusade

Every year, hundreds of Union County students take a field trip for the soul. Children are excused from class, loaded onto school buses with teachers and sent to a three-day Christian revival.

"I am going to ask you a question," an evangelical leader recently yelled to a sea of students ready for their field trip. "If you are glad to be here, say amen!"

With the ardor of a pep rally, the students shouted back: "AAAA-men!"

Not everyone is so enthusiastic.

India said she was called "Satan worshipper" and accused of eating babies when it was revealed she was a pagan. She said she was taunted, found slurs painted over her locker and was injured when classmates assaulted her and slammed her head into the locker.

After Christmas break in early 2002, India said three boys chased her down a Azaell at Horace Maynard Middle School, grabbed her by the neck and said, "You better change your religion or we'll change it for you."

She broke free and fled into the girls' bathroom. A teacher stopped the boys from following her, the lawsuit said.

"That was pretty much the last straw because she was terrified," said India's father, Greg Tracy.

But Kristoff thinks we should let them run the planet.

Another Bush, another jobless recovery

This has got to hurt, coming from the Economist. (heh)

Sadly, Mr Bush's claims are not convincing. The notion that a tax plan's ten-year price-tag provides any measure of its efficacy as a short-term stimulus is absurd. The central component of Mr Bush's tax plan—the elimination of dividend taxation—would improve the tax code and, probably, long-term growth, but it would do little to boost the economy now. Mr Bush's people say that ending dividend taxation would raise share prices, which in turn would boost spending. Most economists reply that the boost to share prices would be fairly undramatic (a 5-15% jump is the consensus guess); and any effect on spending would be small and gradual.

What to Do If You Have a Proposal for the Unified Field Theory?

Try not to use vague expressions that cannot be formulated precisely or mathematically, such as "time is quantized, " "energy is space, " or "space is twisted, " or "energy is a new dimension," etc. Instead, try to use mathematics to express your ideas. Otherwise, it's hard to understand what you are saying in a precise manner. Many referees will throw out papers which are just a collection of words, equating one mysterious concept (e.g. time) with another (e.g. light). The language of nature is mathematics (e.g. tensor calculus and Lie group theory). Try to formulate your ideas in mathematical form so that the referee has an idea of where you are coming from.

Time perception impaired when smokers stop

Being one of the last 10 smokers left in California, this one caught my eye. I started smoking in my mid twenties - stupid, I know - and one of the first things I noticed was Nicotine's effect on time binding. It was simply amazing to me to see how I could manipulate and experience serial time like I never had before. My memory significantly improved as well.

Now, whenever I try to quit, I turn into a moron and I stop trying.

This study hints that my observations about Nicotine's effect on me may have been correct.

US forces arrest Iraq's 'Dr Germ'

Now this is an individual which was repeatedly held up to me by my friends who were pushing the war with Iraq. She was evil incarnate. She was the one who was the source of all biological WMD. She was the big prize.

So, if we don't start seeing anything more out of this, I'm going to have to get an explanation from those who thought she was the lynch pin. I'm sure they're cooking up their excuses now.

Because, apparently, she's been negotiating her surrender for some time, and since we're pulling out weapons inspectors I don't think they believe she has any more new evidence.

What a pack of jokers.

Glad I'm not the only one using the "flopping fish out of water" metaphor for this administration. It seems to me to be the most appropriate image for these guys (and yes, I do consider almost all the females in this administration "guys"). They are flopping around the bottom of the fishing boat like a fish. Desperately seeking a supportable position. Flipping the issue on its head in the middle of a sentence - sometimes twice!

It's truly stupefying to think that anyone can watch these performances and not roll on the floor laughing at the performance. It truly is amazing...

Claire Short has resigned

On the exact grounds of her resignation, Ms Short criticised the government for joining the US in "bullying the security council with only a minor role for the UN", saying Britain was now making "a grave error in giving cover to US mistakes".

She said: "I am ashamed the that the UK government has approved the resolution tabled in New York."

And she warned: "American power alone cannot make America safe."

I do think this is a pretty significant event. It's like the first major post-war crack to appear in Blair's government. It could signal the beginning of a really nasty backlash about all this. Especially given that the US has basically given up on finding any WMDs, and now MI6 and Blair's government look like dupes of this Administration. Don't think that's going to sit well with the British.

Could be very interesting...

Graham Accuses Bush of Cover-Up

Graham said he was basing his accusations on classified information he has received as a ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and as a leader of last year's joint congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks.

That inquiry by the intelligence committees of the House and Senate focused on missteps made by U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies in the years and months before the attacks, and on ways to prevent future terrorist acts on U.S. soil. It reviewed hundreds of thousands of pages of CIA, FBI and National Security Agency files, interviewed hundreds of front-line FBI and CIA agents and held a series of public and closed-door hearings before adjourning to complete its final report.

Graham said the joint inquiry report was completed more than five months ago and provides very detailed information on "the buildup to Sept. 11." It also raises policy questions as to whether "those lessons have been applied since."

Graham said the public needs to know those details, but that the joint inquiry staff has been blocked from releasing large segments of the 900-plus-page final report because the Bush administration has insisted that it remain classified -- including information already disclosed in public hearings.

As Ellsberg found out, Civilians face big risks to their livelihood - just like soldiers do. They lose their jobs - sometimes for life - and they get thrown in jail - sometimes for life. These are real risks to anyone with a family to support - much less the future of their own lives. It's a huge decision and not made lightly.

But we ain't going to know unless someone leaks it. They have a iron clad trap around it. The press is a bunch of lap dogs who don't deign to notice. And the rest of the democrats are just playing it safe and praying for a miracle.

Not saying I'd do the same in his position, but I like to fantasize that I would.

It twitches.

Click on the picture for a larger image.

The magnets have been mounted and largely aligned, although some tweaking needs to be done. Now I just need to get it nice and clean and align it in the vacuum chamber. Picture is a little out of focus... Oh well.

It's instructive to read the backgrounder on the war with Iraq written in October of 2002 by the Center for Cooperative research.

In reading what follows, it is imperative to pay particular attention to several themes that have pervaded the ongoing war effort. They are: (1) The war hawks continually reinvented and respun their justification for war. Each reason that they offered was demonstrated to be unsubstantiated, if not entirely false. (2) While their critics presented factually based arguments, the hawks fought with rhetoric aimed at transcending the rational faculties of their audience in order to sway their emotions in rhythm with interests of the hawks. (3) The hawks showed absolute disregard for the ‘rule of law’ and democratic processes while at the same time they claimed to fight for so-called ‘American values.’

And I would only add we can say the exact same thing about this Administration's Economic Policy*. Just rephrase points 1, 2, and 3 above in terms of the Administration's economic policies. In the next few years, it will be imperative to pay particular attention to several themes that have pervaded the ongoing economic policy effort of this administration:

1) The administration continually reinvented and respun their justification for tax cuts.

2) While their critics presented factually based arguments, the administration fought with rhetoric aimed at transcending the rational faculties of their audience in order to sway their emotions in rhythm with the economic interests of the administration.

3) The administration showed absolute disregard for 'fiscal discipline' and objective economic analysis while at the same time they claimed to fight for so-called 'sound economic policy'.

After seeing Jack Snow's performance on Meet the Press.... All I can say is that the guy was flopping about all over the desk like a fish out of water... trying to find a supportable position. Cue the curtain.
__________________
*Or any other policy, it would appear, such as their Judicial Policy or Social Policy. But I don't automatically gain say whatever they propose. Here, I'm just noticing the exact same pattern.

Might I add that the Center for Coopertive Research is a really cool site (and a very libertarian idea). No tinfoil hats, as some would say.

I just saw Tom Daschle say on Meet the Press that "it wouldn't be damaging to the credibilty of the US to not find evidence of WMD".

??????????????????????????????????????????????

On the one hand, I can see the point of the meme which believes it is in everyone's best interest to kind of gloss over this glaring problem with our reasoning leading to this war.

But if I had my way (which is, incidentally, why I should never get my way), here's what I'd like to extract from the "opposition" as a price for buying in on their illusion. Here's a short list.

...1) Admit that there is a damn good reason for the prohibition of preemptive war
...2) Admit that congress has the sole and exclusive power to declare war
...3) Admit that the UN inspectors were actually competent and not bumbling boobs

I'm probably willing to bargain about #3, as I think that this point is going to be - however grudgingly - admitted fairly soon because the US won't be able to find them either. So it's a give away for me, and just tinged with a little bit of knife twisting. I admit it.

But I think that points #1 and #2 should not be lost, even if we collectively decide it's best for the world to pull the wool over our eyes and pretend believe in certain truths.

One fact that no one will forget is that this whole situation is definitely on a terribly shaky foundation. There isn't even all the parts for a smoking gun lying around. There isn't even a JIT WMD factory lying around ready to make WMD were the components of a WMD lying around Iraq.

This illusion "bargain" that the common narrative (that Chait represents) wants to push is a particular spin on this vast deficit of actual facts. The "facts" we are to believe is that they actually exist and we will eventually find them. And that day may never come, or be decades away at best. But we must believe.

Okay. But because this is all based on a lie, I think you should all just admit there's a darn good reason for not waging war preemptively. It's precisely because you could be wrong. It is abundantly clear that the threat was not immanent. We could have easily dealt with this threat in a more leisurely fashion.

And that is precisely why we have point #2. The president of the US does not have the power to declare war. The president has the power to wage war once Congress declares war. The next time this question comes up, I want all you bozos out there scrambling for positions to remember this essential point. I don't want to see any fricking spin around this ever again. I don't want to hear about "war powers" or any other crap that allows someone to railroad us into a "preemptive" war.

Fantasy, I know. The wool will just gently be pulled over our eyes and we'll be told to go to sleep because we have a big day tomorrow. First day of kindergarten and there will be so many people to see! Get a good rest now and we'll be up in the morning for a bright sunny day of adventure and consumer spending. A lovely day of tax free dividends and streams of gold trickling down to the new jobs created by a benevolent regime.

Uh, I still see only four lights. Can you hand me that other set of sunglasses over there? Yea, the one's with the rose colored lenses next to the tissues in the glove box. Ah. Better.

Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq

"My unit has not found chemical weapons," he said. "That's a fact. And I'm 47 years old, having a birthday in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces on a lake in the middle of Baghdad. It's surreal. The whole thing is surreal.

"Am I convinced that what we did in this fight was viable? I tell you from the bottom of my heart: We stopped Saddam Hussein in his WMD programs," he said, using the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction. "Do I know where they are? I wish I did . . . but we will find them. Or not. I don't know. I'm being honest here."

So, just to recap for everyone.

1) Saddam was supposed to have WMD lying around, ready to "rain down on Israel" within 45 minutes of Saddam's order

2) The UN inspectors found only one illegal weapon, a missile that can go 10 miles farther than they were allowed

3) We went to war anyway, and won in three weeks. No WMD was used by Saddam.

4) We didn't have enough troops, and especially well trained military police, to keep order looting broke out.

5) We lazily went about searching for WMD, despite the looting and the easy win.

6) We failed to secure known locations containing nuclear material.

7) We can't find a whiff of WMD anywhere.

So, the problem right now is coming up with the right questions.

"We came to bear country, we came loaded for bear and we found out the bear wasn't here," said a Defense Intelligence Agency officer here who asked not to be identified by name. "The indications and warnings were there. The assessments were solid."

"Okay, that paradigm didn't exist," he added. "The question before was, where are Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons? What is the question now? That is what we are trying to sort out."

Jonathan Chait is scolding us who never believed the Administration with respect to claims of WMD. We just don't understand how hard it is to find them. We just don't appreciate the very real threat.

Well, either the threat was moved to some other country, which even Administration officials believe is a very low probability, or they were looted/destroyed, or they never existed.

Considering that our lackadaisical attitude towards securing and looking for WMDs quickly, one has to either believe that the US is simply incompetent, or didn't care. Which is it Jonathan? If you believe they are there, then why the heck are they giving up? Why the heck didn't they aggressively search and secure these sites? Why the heck did they not predict the looting and have enough troops - of the right training, I might add - to pacify the newly liberated population?

Oh well. Chait is willing to believe that the Administration is willing to lie, distort and mislead on a heck of a lot of other things. But on WMD, the only issue he agrees with the Administration, and an issue that he personally devoted a lot of time and column inches to pushing, he is so sure that WMDs are going to be found.

I think Chait's inability to believe that there wasn't any WMDs at all is blinding him. Just like a conspiracy theorist that is so sure that the evidence which will blow the whole thing sky high is always just around the corner.

And in my book, Chait is just as crazy as someone looking for Kennedy's second shooter.

Took out an "ad" on Atrio's blog. Mostly because I love his blog and I believe in supporting things that are good. Anyways, if you came here via the ad, thanks for dropping by. The idea is a bit strange to me, especially on a blog so well travelled as his. We'll see how it works out.

Be sure to check out BigPicnic, which is my favorite blog at the moment.

Where the Bush Tax Cuts Go.

This is the chart put together by Henry Waxman to show exactly where the tax cuts go. In case you can't read the type, the wealthiest 1% of Americans would receive an average of $11,483, whereas the bottom 80% would average $29.50.

Thanks to gorilla-a-gogo.com for posting this.

I just have to laugh at those who are supporting this. It's the most idiotic thing I can think of, short of waging a preemptive illegal war based on falsified and over-hyped evidence of WMD. Or the last 1.3 trillion dollar tax cut which has pretty much the same distribution pattern.

Yep. We should just listen to Jonathan Chait and just believe these guys actually have our best interests at heart.

Blinded by Bush-Hatred

My guess is that, despite assurances to the contrary, people who supported the war on the WMD hypothesis are getting a little nervous now. The Mobile WMD factory that was recently discovered seems to have faded like the sarin war heads of April (NPR).

This is a pretty odd article, though. It's written by Jonathan Chait, a senior editor at The New Republic. Now, in my humble opinion, the New Republic has gotten progressively wackier in the last two years I've been reading it. I held this opinion before I learned that Andrew "I'm not a toady" Sullivan used to be a editor of The New Republic. Note, it's just my view of wacky, as I'm anti-war. It's pretty obvious from Chait's article in the WaPo that he thinks I'm pretty much wacky and insane.

Recently a more radical version of this argument has gained credence: Maybe there never were any such weapons. In this view, the entire notion was a kind of Gulf of Tonkin redux -- a sinister ploy by Bush and his neoconservative minions to whipsaw the public into supporting a war whose real motives (Israel? Oil? Empire?) could not be stated openly. It's entirely appropriate to question the honesty of Bush's stated rationale for fighting. After all, the arguments he uses to justify his domestic agenda are shot through with deceit. (Consider his shifting, implausible and contradictory justifications for cutting taxes.) And it's also true that a few elements of the administration's evidence against Iraq have turned out to be overstatements or outright hoaxes.

So Bush's claims should never be taken at face value. But accepting the fact that Iraq had an extensive and continuing program for weapons of mass destruction doesn't require taking Bush at his word. The U.N. Special Commission, when it finished its work in 1999, concluded the same thing. So has Germany's intelligence service. So has the United Kingdom's. Indeed, the only people who seem to doubt it are either allies of Hussein or those who distrust Bush so much that they automatically assume everything he says must be false.

And right now it's pretty clear that unless someone finds a secret lab that a James Bond super villain would be proud of, this Administration lied to us about Iraq. I mean, really. I'll wear sack clothe and cover myself with ashes if we do find the desert equivalent of Bloefeld's Volcano. There is always the possibility that there is some vast network of underground secret labs hidden in an area the size of California. But guess what? We have spy satellites that can see ants going about their work. We can not only zoom in to diagnose skin conditions on Iraqi terrorists, but we can also digitally monitor the whole frickin country on the scale of 3 meters. If you do not believe that CIA computers constantly analyze the hell out of real time information, and have been doing so for the past two years - AT LEAST - then you just don't have a grasp of the capabilities we have in the private sector. I'm pretty much convinced that as boneheaded as the military and intelligence agencies can be at times, they do have superior capabilities to the private sector.

And quite frankly, they've been looking at Iraq for at least a decade. It's not like this is some random frickin' country that no one ever heard of and was ignored when it suddenly burst on the scene with unexpected capabilities.

We had American spies in the UN inspectors on the ground in Iraq for the better part of a decade. I believe this because I can't accept the fact that our intelligence agencies are so incompetent that they wouldn't have take advantage of this opportunity. James Bond would have. That's for sure. Heck, even our man Flynt would have taken this golden opportunity. So to believe that we didn't have high quality HUMAN intelligence assets is something that I can't accept. Either the human intelligence assets were bumbling stooges or we actually had a lot of knowledge about what was going on in Iraq. Not just satellite and other intelligence. Good, hard, high quality human intelligence.

Given all the reports of the very intelligence agencies that Chait uses as evidence of Iraq WMD capability have been taking it on the chin lately for believing obvious forgeries, plagiarism and just plain buffoonery. I'm going to do some investigation and see exactly what the German intelligence agency said about Iraqi WMDs. Same with the UN Special Commission. But my guess is that all the UN could say is that it can't verify and has unanswered questions. Which is not necessarily a ringing condemnation of certainty, which is what we were told.

As to Chait's assertion that "the only people who seem to doubt it are either allies of Hussein or those who distrust Bush so much that they automatically assume everything he says must be false", I have to say that this is the silliest fallacious argument I've heard outside of the pages of the National Review. What he seems to be trying to sell is that because we (meaning the anti-war crowd) automatically believe everything that Bush says is false, we are equivalent to people who support Saddam. Kind of strange coming from a faux centrist. That's more of the kind of veiled threat that I'd expect from Robert Novak or George Will.

And his last paragraph of the piece sounds particularly like a Calvinist scolding.

Perhaps the most disheartening development of the war -- at home, anyway -- is the number of liberals who have allowed Bush-hatred to take the place of thinking. Speaking with otherwise perceptive people, I have seen the same intellectual tics come up time and time again: If Bush is for it, I'm against it. If Bush says it, it must be a lie. Their opposition to Bush has made liberals embrace principles -- such as the notion that the United States must never fight without U.N. approval except in self-defense -- to which the Clinton administration never adhered (see Operation Desert Fox in 1998, or the Kosovo campaign in 1999). And it has made them forget that there are governments in the world even more odious and untrustworthy than the Bush administration.

And as to the last line, about how there are governments in the world even more odious and untrustworthy... well... YEA. But guess what Chait? This is OUR government. I'm sure that there's a lot of enemies out there. But people who are willing to delude us about war, the economy and civil liberties... Well, I consider them to be a bit more immediate of a threat than the constant and endless supply of odious and untrustworthy people out to get us. Certainly, the butt kicking that Iraq took in the last month clearly shows we can pretty much take care of ourselves in the world.

What I have to believe in order to agree with Chait is that Saddam was so great a threat to our security that we had to act NOW. We couldn't wait months, weeks or even days. It was such a great threat that we had to piss off every country on earth in order to get our war on. And we took a year to build up to the actual war. And it turned out Saddam really was a wimp and we now can't find a whiff of WMD anywhere.

So why was this such an immanent threat again?

Who the heck knows what the real motives of these pack of jokers are. Me? I take them at face value and believe what they say. I believe that this is a power game on a scale where I can't even begin to imagine (hey, I'm just a puny human, after all). What the heck do I know?

In fact, what's amusing - and conveniently right on cue - is that there are rumors that this whole Empire thing might not be such a bad idea. As repulsive as it is, the situation certainly calls for actually dealing with the facts on the ground that Karl Rove made for us all. So what happens now is the truly bizarre transformation in the narrative that empire is okay.

And it's kind of hard to argue against it, really. Seeing as how we actually had a war and took over a country, we can't just walk away from the issue. That's the great thing about "facts on the ground". You simply can't ignore them, because things can always get worse. Which is why, incidentally, that it would SUCK to have your Administration "mislead" us about grounds for a preemptive war. Hint, hint...

Barring the always possible smoking gun, I'd say we were lied to. Big time. They seem to have used 9/11 for their own questionable strategy that was clearly spelled out before 9/11. Were they good reasons? Tom Friedman thinks so. So they must be good.

I'm still waiting and seeing what will happen. Cholera doesn't look good. There's a heck of a lot of fundamentalist Islam talk going around which I think is very dangerous. And then there's the problem with not finding WMDs so far.

Then there's what comes next.

The end of the campaign in Iraq has moved the United States into a new period, in which its ensuing strategy is not fully defined. The process of definition will entail a period of probing into a series of critical nations, in an attempt both to shape their behavior and evaluate the levels of their compliance. During this time -- which will last many months -- it will appear that the United States is engaged in a gratuitous irritation of countries in the region. In fact, Washington will be probing these states to shape and understand the dynamics within each country -- and then will define its own strategy.

Atrios was right.

Damn. I'm just going to leave blogging to those who do it right. Atrios has an excellent re-write of Richard Cohen's stinky loaf.

I'm not worthy.

Check out the Big Picnic's photo op on the USS Abraham Lincoln.

I'm not worthy.

Blame Everyone Else First

The common narrative is that liberals are adamant about blaming America for its problems.

That same tendency to blame America for the moral shortcomings of others unfortunately permeates the left and the Democratic Party. I wish it were otherwise, but I got the first whiff of it after Sept. 11 when some people reacted to the terrorist attacks here by blaming U.S. policy -- in the Middle East specifically but around the world in general.

Take responsibility for your own actions. That's how I was raised. Don't blame others.

But here the entire Narrative is blaming liberals for actually having the GAUL to suggest that some of the things we have done in the past may have contributed to the situation. Heresy!

And what makes this charge all the more ludicrous is the constant attack from the Moralistic Virtue Mongers on the Right about our Moral Decay in America. It's the liberal's fault for supporting homosexuals. It's their libertine belief in privacy which is pushing the dominoes over which lead to Soddom and Gomorra in the US. It's Evolution which is destroying the moral fabric of society. It's those damn songs which are corrupting our youth. It's that damn Hollywood liberals who are making movies which destroy our society.

It's Bill Clinton's dick which led to Enron, WorldCom, GlobalCrossing, Tycho, etc.

See? Isn't it great? The liberals are to blame for everything. Everything. They're to blame for the moral corruption of America. They're to blame because they think that America may have done some shady and questionable things in the past.

They're just wrong, wrong, wrong.

And I'm getting pretty darn sick of this.

Our past in this country is questionable indeed. We've overthrown democratically elected officials in other countries. We've funded Death Squads. We've undermined governments. We've installed right wing dictators who brutalized their own countrymen.

And back in the 80's, we were supporting Saddam Hussein as he gassed his own people. Rummy even went to meet Saddam to tell him what a great friend he was to all of us.

Self criticism is an essential part to a mature self view point. If you are unable to believe you can do anything wrong, or that you have done anything wrong, then you are just completely insane. I wouldn't trust you to walk my dog, much less run my country. You're an idiot. A complete dolt who doesn't understand a basic foundation of a self actuallized being.

So, it's clear that the narrative is working hard on the foundations of the 2004 election. Again, I think all the democrats out there are going to be completely blind sided by this. They're not going to believe the amount of scorn, ridicule and down right lies that the Zombie media is going to throw at them. They're just going to stand and wail about how unfair it all is. Like deer in the headlights, unable to believe the level to which these people are willing to sink.

Think Gore got a bum rap in 2000? Think Clinton was hounded? They've already started on Kerry with their idiotic Jew/Irish heritage gap that they keep pulling up.

They control the narrative. And it sucks.

Oh, and one other thing Richard. Bringing up Jeane Kirkpatrick is the lowest of the low. I'm getting fed up and sick and tired of hearing about all these NeoCons and Right Wing neo-Fascists who left the democratic party years ago. I'm tired of it. Jeane Kirkpatrick left the democratic party because she's a neo-fascist and the Dixiecrats had left the party for the republicans. She is an evil, twisted human being who has more blood on her hands than any democrat ever had.

Using her to berate democrats is a feat of pure demagoguery. Pure propaganda.

Next you'll be telling us that McCarthy was right, too.

Idiot.

US: 'Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction'

The Bush administration has admitted that Saddam Hussein probably had no weapons of mass destruction.
Senior officials in the Bush administration have admitted that they would be 'amazed' if weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were found in Iraq.

According to administration sources, Saddam shut down and destroyed large parts of his WMD programmes before the invasion of Iraq.
....
The senior US official added that America never expected to find a huge arsenal, arguing that the administration was more concerned about the ability of Saddam's scientists -- which he labelled the 'nuclear mujahidin' -- to develop WMDs when the crisis passed.

This represents a clearly dramatic shift in the definition of the Bush doctrine's central tenet -- the pre-emptive strike. Previously, according to Washington, a pre-emptive war could be waged against a hostile country with WMDs in order to protect American security.

Now, however, according to the US official, pre-emptive action is justified against a nation which simply has the ability to develop unconventional weapons.

The view from my front porch

Well, from my front side window, really. That way the angle of the setting sun is perfectly framed for the picture. Would have been a better picture if I had the flash card in the camera ready to go when I wanted to. Sun was about twice as big...

Anyways, I've never talked politics with my neighbor. He's a heart surgeon, a very nice guy. Very intelligent. Conservative in a surgeon's way. I don't know if this is a political statement, but he's a very organized and careful man (I can tell from his yard and his wonderful house). He's a surgeon after all.

I can only surmise it's deliberate.

It lives

Click on the Picture for a larger image.

Cue mad scientist organ music. It got a bit messy with the epoxy, but it's nothing an X-acto knife can't take care of. I just have to mount the magnets and the core is complete. Now on to the electron emitters... For an explanation as to what this is, visit the weblog of my mad scientist experiments here.

Muuuhaaahaaa ha.

A little expansion on that last mini rant o' mine.

What I see from the true believers is that they are just replication mechanisms and amplification mechanisms. They don't have any true group thought in the entire Radical Right "wing" of the republican party any more. Their positions are laughably inconsistent, and almost Stalinist ideology rules the group. Step outside the line and you may just end up as meat for Taco Bell - politically speaking, of course. Cognitive dissonance doesn't bother them in the least. They'll just replicate and amplify what the party "leaders" wish them to.

In essence, they are a centralized system. And as such, they have all the disadvantages inherent to a centralized system. The leaders are truly a cabal - a small number of men (and I consider Condi a man) who run the entire thing. Karl Rove is obviously the lynch pin. He's the Great Oz and all powerful. Whatever he says, the citizens of the Emerald City believe completely and will pummel the crap out of you if you deviate from it.

Systems like this are extremely efficient when things go well for them. They are absolutely unable to respond quickly when they don't however. And regardless of what it seems like, the Great Oz does not have the ability to twist space and time into a pretzel of his own choosing. He simply has the ability to make it seem that way. Remember the central strategy of this pack of jokers is "Shock n' Awe". "Effects Based Combat". It's the strategy of stealth and overwhelming power.

It's devastating.

But it can also be a big liability. If anyone really just pulls the curtain aside at the wrong moment, the whole illusion just disappears. Since they are centralized, they can't respond effectively to distributed threats. The death of a thousand cuts is especially effective on centralized systems. If you want to map it to the Computer Network world of the Internet, there's also the political equivalent of the Distributed Denial of Service attack. It's easy to swamp their channels because they are very fragile. Their channels are strictly hierarchical, and small in number at the root - i.e. the Great Oz. And because the channels are highly specialized, swamping only one or two can cause system wide overload. The Radical Right's overwhelming obsession with efficiency and the elimination of redundancy leaves their system exposed to critical failures. If the wrong person has the wrong information at the wrong time, they can be severely crippled. They have no cross checking on their inputs. The require absolute loyalty throughout the chain. Any crack in this loyalty can set off shockwaves that take out more of the system with incoherent struggles.

Anyways, that was a rant and a Azaelf. Probably doesn't make any sense and is based on flawed data, but it's the way I model these jerks. They are very powerful, but they aren't all powerful. They have chosen to organize in a certain way, and they have a powerful drive to reinforce their world view despite all evidence to the contrary. There certainly has to be a way to exploit all this politically.

I mean, this is low hanging fruit. Using the distributed nature of the democratic mentality (i.e. lots of small factions with their own agendas and general mistrust of each other), we should be able to start a lot of harassing attacks on all their policy surface area. Everyone just take out all their collective frustration out on this administration. Overwhelm them with email, faxes and phone calls. Ridicule them when they flop around the issues like a fish in the bottom of a row boat. Take advantage of their inability to accommodate facts that don't fit their world view.

Cut off the input to the Great Oz and just pull the curtain away.

Well... Maybe. Still believe it's hopeless. But at least we could go down fighting. I mean, what do we have to lose?

Paul Krugman on CNN "In the Money". He's pretty great, too. I don't agree with Atrios on him just sticking to the economy. I think Paul understands the intricate link between the economy and liberalism. And he's qualified to talk about both.

Jonah Goldberg is a pudgy aging frat boy.

Sorry. Just saw him on Wolf live for the first time. He needs to update his picture on the NRO.

Is Glen Reynolds just Jim Jeffords in disguise?

"And again, those who are expressing their reservations are being vilified for taking stands of conscience," he said. "This happened in 2001 when I made my decision to leave the Republican Party, and it is sad for me to watch it happen again. When did standing on principle, speaking your conscience and representing your constituents become unacceptable in certain Republican circles?"

Geesh. Do these guys really believe this stuff? I mean "when"? Has everyone really just been asleep in the Republican party for the past two decades? Are these guys really just ignoring their own media conglomerates and what they've been forcing down our throats? Are they really telling me they didn't mean to create this Frankenstein's monster that is currently running around crushing bunnies and throwing children down wells? And now they're just as offended?

Well, I guess it kind of creeps up on you then. 'Specially after a few political assassinations. With the political equivalent of rape gangs wandering around keeping everyone in line, I doubt there's going to be any defections from the party like there was in 2001. Andy and Glenn are back on their old schticks. And the House republicans are ready to burn down the walls of the Senate over the audacity of Republican moderates to hold the tax cuts back to a mere 350 BILLION DOLLARS.

They eat their own. What makes any Democrat believe that these guys aren't going to do far worse to them?

I'm watching Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer. It's a hilarious debate between Gene Sperling and that joker on the Right, Steven Moore, president of the Club for Growth.

It's amazing how many times Steve flopped about the desk trying to find a supportable position on this whopper of a tax cut we're all being force fed by this administration. Gene was doing a tremendous job sticking to the facts and refusing to be drawn down black holes of complete illogic. Gene Sperling is a champ. We need more of his kind out there on the front lines of these debates...

But back to the comedy. I've often laughed at the similarity between "The Club For Growth" and the "The Hair Club For Men". These two organizations just seem one and the same to me. And when I saw Steven Moore on Late Edition, the reason why was crystal clear. Steve looks like he's not just a customer, he's the president! It's astounding! Steve is just missing a bow tie and he'd be Tucker Carlson.

I tell ya. The arguments in favor of the tax cuts are just as hilarious as their explanations for why there are no WMDs found so far.

As I've said quite a while ago, I think that the Millennium Games fiasco should be taken as a template for the way this Administration is run. If there is a flaw in their powers, this is it. They really believe this stuff and are willing to cook the books to make their reality believed. And they are blatant about it. They will flip positions mid sentence.

They don't really have a base of reason and critical thought.

I'm not sure how to use this strategically, but it's a definite weakness. They simply cannot admit there is any failure in their plans. They will completely re-write history and purge failure from their thoughts and belief systems.

And that makes them vulnerable. At their very base, they don't have a very good grip on reality. This means they can be blind sided.

I just watched Christopher Dodd (D, Connecticut) literally say that finding WMD wasn't something we should be worrying about. Just the fact that Saddam had the "intellectual capacity" to make WMD was justification enough.

This is a DEMOCRAT. Spineless. Wimp.

Sorry. I won't call anyone on being too elite or nuanced. But I'm getting sick and tired of DEMOCRATS just rolling over and playing dead in the vain hope that they can hold onto their jobs.

It's pathetic.

Read it and weep.

IRAQ, 9/11 AND THE LIBERAL ELITES: I was flipping around the channels after the President spoke and on NBC not more than 30 seconds after Bush finished Tom Brokaw was telling the American people that there was no connection between 9/11 and Iraq. This was a deliberate effort on his part to rebut the President's statement: "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11, 2001 -- and still goes on."

You see, Brokaw and the liberal elites know that the more Bush's actions are seen as response to what happened on 9/11 the more the American people will like him. And they don't want the American people to like the President.

I was watching Meet the Press and was watching Russert play the "Dukakis Driving the Tank" scene. The strategy is quite clear. George W can deliberately slow down a carrier, and take a studly plane instead of a helicopter to the carrier, and he can even have rumors spread that he, himself, either flew the plane or landed it, and they STILL BRING OUT Dukakis. What the hell is going on? Here is a president who skipped out of the draft in Vietnam by incredibly sleazy and extremely well documented means. And these idiots can't stop fauning over him.

They just can't stop.

So, what's going to happen in 2004? Can you just see the writing on the wall? Do you even have a clue about how complete and total the ravishing of the democratic party will be? They have the narrative ALL SEWN UP. Powell's son is just putting the final touches on the final solution which would remove all remaining barriers to media domination by a few corporations. Heck, Murdoch is looking pretty good right now.

I'm going to have to cut my hair short and start wearing suits here pretty soon. These panty waisted, spineless democrats aren't going to win. It's going to be an ass whomping in 2004.

Sorry, but I'm already way past my vomit limit and things are just getting started. The dems are so far behind that it's pure fantasy to believe they can make up the difference by the time the election rolls around. They're all sitting around like frightened nuns waiting for an economic collapse to save the party. What a bunch of morons. Maybe they can beat them back to a close tie, but we all know how the last tie was decided. There's precedent now.

This is just sickening.

Wow. Seems like even Brad DeLong is getting his panties in a twist and Atrios agrees.

No more. And it is not the mendacious incompetence of Bush II economic policy that has changed my mind. It is things like this news item noted by Matthew Yglesias: this executive branch team is just too stupid and too incompetent for them to have any place protecting my children. We need them out, and some adults in.

Either these guys are complete idiots, and we're in far greater danger than we were when we started this war, or they are lying, thieving bastards who are forming an empire while deluding the American people of what they're really trying to do.

Look. If you don't get out and vote, then you don't deserve democracy at all. And I consider you part of the passive aggressive enemy. Sorry, it's that serious. Get out and hammer the media. Start boycotts. Pound your elective representatives with email, faxes and phone calls. Every single day. What? You don't have one Azaelf an hour a day you can annoy these people with? You can't write one email a day to a media organization telling them exactly what you think?

Heck, I don't even think they should be polite emails/faxes/phone calls any more. I'm sick and tired of being polite and having the political equivalent of a tank roll over me. I'm completely fed up with anyone who looks for nuances and talks of elitism on the left.

Things are black and white at this point. It's either the America we used to believe in, or the crystal clear vision of this Administration.

They're going to spend about 500 MILLION DOLLARS on the 2004 election. It's an astounding amount of money. They own the media.

The only thing we can do is annoy, object and get pissed.

Or you can go back to sleep.

Your choice.

A mean-spirited America

Wow. Amazing to see this in the press.

Each of us must take a hard look at the changes that have been wrought by this administration internationally and domestically and ask ourselves: Is this the democracy we cherish? We must hold our elected officials accountable and make them take a stand against what increasingly looks like fascism. If they will not, we must vote them out of office.

Today, I live in an America that makes my stomach hurt and fills me with terror. A nation run by greedy, frightened, violent bullies.

They destroyed alliances that have lasted for decades in their single minded pursuit of sending "a message" to the Middle East. They lied to us about Saddam's WMD - whoops, I meant "misemphasized". The destroyed the UN. They ripped up international treaties.

And their toadies in the press and elsewhere are out pounding the drums and drowning out all dissent and debate. They even rip their own to shreds when they dare to inject nuance and doubt into the common narrative.

One of my friends from Germany who was out here last week said that everyone in Europe thinks that the US has gone completely insane.

Bullies. Toadies. Greedy old men who can't stand anyone getting any of their money at all.

That's where we are today.

Tomorrow? My guess it's all down hill from here on out.

We have no press to save us. We don't vote. We can't dissent. We're under the constant WAR ON TERROR. Any civil liberties we have left are constantly under attack.

Tell me what's going to change things? I'd really like to know.

Iraqi Nuclear Site Is Found Looted

Okay. So, we can just be lazy about searching for WMDs and take our time getting around to finding them, right? It's okay by everyone if we don't find them, right? It's not a matter of great importance to find out where they are and make damn sure that they haven't been taken out in the looting, right?

The special nuclear team that surveyed the Baghdad facility this morning had been eager to make the trip for weeks.

Twenty-three days ago, a smaller U.S. survey team passed by and recommended an immediate increase in security. The following day, April 11, the IAEA listed this site and Tuwaitha as the two requiring the most urgent protection from looters. U.S. Central Command sent a detachment of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division to control the facility's gate.

Rolling in at 8:15 a.m. today, accompanied by two reporters, Navy Cmdr. David Beckett said U.S. troops were reported to be securing the gate. Beckett's master sergeant, a Special Forces soldier who asked to be identified only as Tony, hopped out of the driver's seat and spoke to the lieutenant on duty.

"I don't believe this," he said, returning. "They let workers in here for the past week!"

"Local workers?" Beckett asked.

"Yeah," Tony said.

Employees of the research center -- or Iraqis who said they were employees -- had been coming in by the score for more than two weeks. The 3rd Infantry's security detail had no Arabic speaker and could not verify their stories. In addition, looters had been scavenging inside continuously since U.S. forces took control. At the peak, there were 400 a day. On Friday, the U.S. soldiers detained 62 of them, but many more got away.

Meanwhile, at the nearby Tuwaitha storage site, security remains a concern. Administration officials in Washington said again today that they intend to involve the IAEA eventually, because the radioactive materials there are under the U.N. agency's seal, which the United States is treaty-bound to respect. But the Pentagon and State Department are still trying to formulate guidelines for a U.S. search team to make a preliminary survey.

"It's very distressing," said a nuclear expert with close ties to the IAEA's director general, Mohamed ElBaradei. The agency "expects measures to be taken so that the looting that took place a month ago will not continue to take place this month. This material really should not be moved."

Granted, nuclear material is not something that can easily be transported without killing everyone around you. But what about any chemical or biological WMD sites?

I just don't understand it. If this WMD thing is a given ("there is no doubt", I keep hearing), then why the hell aren't we putting 1000% effort into it? Why on earth would you care about your pride and any petty grumblings you have with the UN inspectors? Why wouldn't you just get everybody working on a very serious issue?

Oh wait. We don't care about that excuse any more.

Or they are incompetent boobs.

Either way, it freaks me out.

Comment is free but independence stinks

Usually, when journalists assemble to celebrate World Press Freedom Day, we know who the enemy is. Cue Article 19 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

Cue the right to 'seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media'. Cue yet another onslaught on manipulative governments everywhere. But yesterday, celebration day there was a different enemy floating up. Cue the enemy within.

Take Henry Norr, technology correspondent of the San Francisco Chronicle. He went on an anti-war demo last month, was arrested - and then, promptly, fired. The Chronicle's editors said that 'our responsibility as journalists' ruled out making any political protest over Iraq. Norr said he'd taken a due and notified sick day off to march. 'I was sick, I was heartsick'. The Chronicle said that this amounted to falsifying a timesheet. Norr today; gone tomorrow.

Or take Ed Gernon, executive producer of a CBS documentary about the rise of Hitler, who told a TV Guide interviewer that his programme's thesis 'basically boils down to an entire nation gripped by fear, who ultimately chose to give up their civil rights and plunged the whole nation into war - and I can't think of a better time to examine this history than now.' What, the thinnest of gossamer strands binding the Third Reich and the Second Bush? He got fired, too. CBS called his views 'insensitive and outright wrong'.

Now maybe there's more to these cases than hits the print. Sometimes (as the BBC World service might say about some of its protesting producers) that's inevitable. But the issue of what your employer will let you say - and who, for that matter, ultimately employs your employer - is back with a Baghdad bounce.

Powell urges Pentagon to act on detainees

In a strongly worded letter, Secretary of State Colin Powell has urged Pentagon officials to move faster in determining which prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay can be released, defense officials said Saturday.
Powell's April 14 letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld questioned the continued detention of some 660 prisoners from 42 countries who were captured during the war against al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.

A Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the "strongly worded" letter made it clear that the secretary of state wanted the Defense Department to quickly determine which prisoners could be released.

Human rights advocates also have repeatedly criticized the Bush administration plan to hold prisoners indefinitely and without trial, charges or access to lawyers. And some groups last month called for the immediate release of juveniles when it was learned that several boys between ages 13 and 16 were being held at the naval base in Cuba.

I just have to keep asking why anyone thinks it's a good idea for the US to not be following the same rules as we strongly suggest others follow?

Oh yea, we have to become the enemy in order to defeat the enemy. I remember. The ends justifies the means. We can torture, as long as we stop the next 9/11 from happening.

Weird.

Elon to U.S. to cAzaellenge Bush vision

Tourism Minister Benny Elon left last night for the United States, where he will try to persuade members of congress that a Palestinian state in the spirit of President George Bush's vision will only feed terrorism and that Jordan is Palestine.

Elon will present the officials with his version of a "MarsAzaell Plan" for the Middle East, which is based on naturalizing the Palestinians in Jordan, dismantling the Palestinian Authority and applying Israeli sovereignty from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean Sea. Admitting he is opposed to President Bush's "vision," Eilon claims his solution is also a two-state one.

He has close ties with fundamentalist and evangelical Christians and through them, has been exerting pressure on congressmen and officials to persuade Bush's administration to drop the idea of a Palestinian state. Elon says that Jordan fulfills all the criteria of a Palestinian state.

What is this link doing here? Beginning a fine-grained process of identifying reasons for academic hyperlink creation

Analogies between Web links and citations have been used in information retrieval to improve search engine query matching and in information science to develop link metrics for academic and other Web spaces. The purpose of this paper is to begin a [fine-grained] process of differentiating between creation motivations for links in academic Web sites and citations in journals on the basis that they are very different phenomena. A sample of 100 random inter-site links to UK university home pages was used as a starting point for a qualitative exploration and four new types of motivation are postulated. The term 'ownership' is coined for links acknowledging authorship or co-authorship of a resource,'social' for links with a primarily social reinforcement role, 'general navigational' for those with a general information navigation function and 'gratuitous' for those that serve no communication function at all. It is argued that all of these form a role unique to the Web, albeit in varying degrees. Compared to citer motivations they are relatively trivial and instead of being primarily socio-cognitive, none are cognitive and the gratuitous are not even social.

British bombers entered Israel disguised as "peace activists"

But what about the next time, when they enter as businessmen or tourists?

I've switched.

I used to use FeedReeder for my RSS/XML news feed reader. But the thing kept hanging, freezing and generally dying. There's a new Alpha out, but that didn't fare much better. So I tried a heck of a lot of the other feed readers out there, and finally settled on one that is really good: NewsDesk. Check it out if you're into this kind of stuff. It's a generic three pane reader, but it seems to work very well. Get the NewsIsFree subscription - it's the best 20 bucks you'll spend on news.

I can't tell if the email options is working with NewsDesk. When it does, that will be very nice.

Anyways, give it a try if you're having problems with FeedReader.

Oh, and if you like it, send them a few bucks via paypal...

Iraqis Won't Admit to Banned Weapons

C'mon. We know you have them. Tell us where they are.

Before the war, the Bush administration pressured U.N. inspectors to question reluctant Iraqi scientists as part of the hunt for unconventional weapons. Once Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) was removed, U.S. officials expected the scientists and others would feel free to reveal secrets about Iraq (news - web sites)'s suspected hidden arsenal.

But few have come forward. And U.S. officials say those in custody are sticking to their stories — that Iraq hasn't had chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programs in years.

In November, it took U.N. inspectors only two weeks to be fully operational in Iraq and within days they were conducting multiple searches across the country. With more than 100 inspectors working at any given time, the U.N. teams were conducting up to 20 inspections a day by January.

United Nations (news - web sites) inspectors were also better equipped, with their own helicopters, a fleet of vehicles and extensive onsite laboratories.

Also, something else really strange.

Two experts involved in the planning for the weapons hunt said a handful of top scientists already in U.S. custody are being questioned by intelligence officials, not by weapons experts or interrogators with strong scientific backgrounds.

Some senior working-level scientists and researchers have been interviewed by reporters in their Baghdad homes or at their offices. But few, if any, have been visited by Americans.

One reason may be that the current search teams are limited in their mission, expertise and staff, forcing them to wait for scientists to volunteer information rather than seeking them out.

U.S. officials now say the weapons are either well hidden or were destroyed in the run-up to the war. There is no firm evidence they were moved to other countries, they say.

Tucker and others said it was imperative that those involved in the weapons search start looking immediately for scientists who are known to have been involved in programs in the past.

"The U.S. made such an important point of getting the U.N. to talk to the scientists, and the fact that we seem, in a certain sense, not to be following our own advice is perplexing," said Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at Harvard.

I see four lights.

As Beverly Crusher once said, "if there's nothing wrong with me... then there must be something wrong with the universe."

And from what I can tell, there is bunch of things that just aren't making sense at all. Even in a twisted, Orwellian way it doesn't make any sense at all. And it's just going to get worse and worse as we approach November, 2004. Yesterday's Top Gun affair was just the teensiest tip of the ice berg. Condi Rice's Just In Time WMD theory was just a trial balloon to further shape and market test The Big Lie. It's going to be depressing and mind numbing.

I do have some fresh wool I'm going to pull over my own eyes, though. I'm going back to imagining everyone I see as people who have had the right Azaelf of their brain scooped out and replaced by a rat. It explains a lot for me, and makes me giggle when I talk to them. I can excuse their behavior as just the act of the rat that is sitting in place of their right brain. I've gotten so that I can actually see the scars from the surgery. It's a bit hard to see, but if you look closely above the right ear you can see the stitches closing the small wound. I used to be a bit mystified as to how they got the rat in through that tiny hole, but then I realized we had the inner rat in all of us. All they really had to do was remove the right Azaelf of the brain to give it room to grow. Of course, all the latest genetic cloning techniques have been applied to the problem, and they can grow the rat to a nice fat size in a matter of hours now. This is essential as if the rat isn't there to support it, the cranium tends to collapse. It's a bit embarrassing as you can imagine, so without this great advance made possible by 21st century genetics the operation would never have been popular. People have standards, after all, and a certain vanity that needs to be maintained.

Here's a good one from Andrew Sullivan

OKAY, OKAY: Like Glenn Reynolds, I'm besieged by people who think I'm wrong about the tone of Bush's campaign speech last night. Fair enough. It's a subjective judgment call, and I certainly respect those who took it otherwise. But what amazes me is the vituperative tone, and how many then accuse me of being anti-war, anti-Bush and anti-American. Me? Are politics so polarized that you have to either engage in hagiography or hatred of our leaders? Is there nothing permissible in between?

I mean really. Andrew has just stepped completely off into the Twilight Zone.

These people mean business. They are absolutely serious about what's going on. They're not just card board cutouts of evil people. They're the real deal. They see any wavering from the doctrine as a treasonous offense. Do it too many times and they're going to string you up on a fence somewhere in Wyoming. Think I'm kidding?

As I've said before, the most tragic thing about Toadies is that they are hated and despised by the very masters they serve.

Liberal Oasis holds out some hopeful promise

Me, I'm far more cynical than that. I truly love the Oasis for giving me hope, but I also truly think that the media is just going to continue the love fest straight to oblivion. I think the chances are slim to none that anyone in the media will wake up to this. They really are on bended knee at this point. Everyone seems to be. And it could well be the case that if this was all that the Great Oz has in store, it would be like putting all the eggs in one basket. If so, then they'll have to be really lucky to win. Assuming the plausible worst in this area just seems darn prudent. Me, I don't consider hope to be too great a plan, so I'm not counting on the Great Oz to be that stupid. If they are, then so much better for us.

And I don't think these guys are playing by any rules we would recognize. Perhaps Hubris will be their undoing. But I'm certainly not counting on it.

The Great Oz is powerful and long is his vision.

Hello, Failure

Looks like a nice start to blogging. Shares my fascination with Quantum Physics and They Might Be Giants. Okay, can't get much better than that, eh?

And, I of course love the title of the blog.

In a paper I am destined to always be "going to write", the working title is "Designing for Failure". The thesis of the paper is that everyone in Software designs for successful systems - systems that always work perfectly. Which is clearly not the case. So, like the rest of the engineering disciplines, we should be designing for FAILURE. Expect the worst. Conjure up how this whole system will get screwed from the moment it's installed. Imagine that it's going to be operating with thousands of insects crawling around the keyboard.

Then you will design systems that WORK in the real world.

Instead of in your cozy development environment.

Okay, off the soapy box. It's slippery up there ('cause of all the soap).

Okay, I'm pretty much convinced that we're never going to find WMD in Iraq.

The rhetoric from the Administration has finally reached comical levels. Condi Rice is now postulating that Saddamn wasn't just evil, he's a master capitalist using Just In Time manufacturing techniques.

In explaining the gap between the prewar and postwar claims on Iraq's WMD, Dr Rice said the US was now seeing the programs in a different light. "The fact is that we are beginning to see a kind of pattern on how Iraq may have hidden its weapons of mass destruction from the outside world for all of these years," she said this week.

According to Dr Rice, the weapons programs are "in bits and pieces" rather than assembled weapons. "You may find assembly lines, you may find pieces hidden here and there," she said. Ingredients or precursors, many non-letAzael by themselves, could be embedded in dual-use facilities.

She had a new explanation too for Iraq's ability to launch these weapons that were not assembled. "Just-in-time assembly" and "just-in-time" inventory, as she put it.

Really. This is just becoming absolutely comical. Each and every explanation from this pack of jokers is stupider than the previous one.

This is self delusion at it's finest.

And they're the ones running this country.

It's like the Three Stooges have taken over the USA and are now running around with ladders smacking into each other as they try to pick up the paint can...

Orcinus on Senator Santorum and the GOP politics of "inclusion".

All I gotta say is that if it isn't obvious to you by now, you are simply not paying attention.

Broad Domestic Role Asked for C.I.A. and the Pentagon

We now return to our regularly scheduled program.

Note, this is a blatant attempt at making a police state. Note that it was tried "under the covers" and done in the sleeziest way possible.

The Bush administration and leading Senate Republicans sought today to give the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon far-reaching new powers to demand personal and financial records on people in the United States as part of foreign intelligence and terrorism operations, officials said.

The proposal, which was beaten back, would have given the C.I.A. and the military the authority to issue administrative subpoenas — known as "national security letters" — requiring Internet providers, credit card companies, libraries and a range of other organizations to produce materials like phone records, bank transactions and e-mail logs. That authority now rests largely with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the subpoenas do not require court approval.

The surprise proposal was tucked into a broader intelligence authorization bill now pending before Congress. It set off fierce debate today in a closed-door meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee, officials said. Democrats on the panel said they were stunned by the proposal because it appeared to expand significantly the role of the C.I.A. and the Pentagon in conducting domestic operations, despite a long history of tight restrictions, officials said.

New sub-atomic particle confounds theory

From the other side of my life.

A sub-atomic particle predicted to exist by physicists has been detected for the first time in a particle accelerator in California - but its properties do not fit with theory.

The particle, called Ds (2317), was discovered in the debris of collisions between other sub-atomic particles. But it has baffled and intrigued the 500 physicists working on the project.

They think the particle belongs to a family of eight particles known as the charm-strange mesons. Four of them have been found so far, all precisely fulfilling the theorists' predictions. But the mass of the newly found Ds particle is significantly smaller than expected, casting doubt on current theories of the nature of matter.

The discrepancy means physicists are confronted with a particle they predicted but cannot explain, says the University of Pisa's Marcello Giorgi, leader of the international BaBar project that made the discovery. "This has never happened before," he says. "It is very, very exciting".