October 2003 Archives

So it's pretty funny to hear the RWAP defense against allegations of cronyism in the contracts for Iraq reconstruction. The punditry spins the following meme

$500,000 for 10's of billions in contracts. That doesn't sound like a real bribe.

It's pretty funny to couple this bit of hand waving with the imminent threat argument a while back. The reason why we had to have the contracts awarded without bidding was that we had to do this real fast because the war was imminent. Well, the threat has turned out to merely be a metaphysical argument about Saddam's theoretical capability to supply Al Qaeda with WMDs.

He turned out to be absolutely no threat to the surrounding region. The missiles that Saddam was building in violation to UN resolutions were only 7 miles over the limit. Yea, technically a violation. But hardly a threat to the surrounding countries. Saddam didn't even have the remote capability of fielding WMDs that could threaten anyone. Sanctions were working. He certainly kept programs around, but without restricted material and equipment, it's laughable to think we wouldn't notice.

Fact is, the UN had inspectors in the country. With the US breathing down his neck, Saddam allowed us to inspect even the presidential palaces. All of the world's electronic surveillance was trained on Iraq. He wasn't waiting for a crucial component - one that is easily smuggled into the country and readily available in the non embargoed world. I mean, sure. If someone smuggled him in some weapons grade Uranium and some working bomb plans from N. Korea, Pakistan, India then if he had a lot of other high technology (machining equipment, electronic equipment, exotic alloys) then maybe he'd be able to assemble it so it actually worked. And maybe they'd be able to smuggle it into Israel or Saudi Arabia.

But really guys. Let's take the tinfoil hats off.

Anyways, the whole metaphysical argument is really all anyone has left anymore because we haven't found jack shit. And that's what makes this whole fiasco so precious.

There is no way to parse your way out of it. The simple fact is, the place is clean and you're arguing against Occam's razor using even more preposterous conspiracy theories. Hardly a sound position rooted on bedrock reality.

And there are still real, honest to "Bob" measurements of the entire Year of Psychobabble^tm in the form of bloated, no bid, sweet heart deal contracts handed out to cronies of Dick Cheney. Billions of dollars worth of data pointing the finger at the moon.

See, because of the metaphysical threat Saddam posed, we threw these fat contracts to our buddies because we pissed everyone off with our single minded pursuit of the war. We simply couldn't open bidding to French or German firms. They were questioning our single minded drive to war and they are stinky Europeans anyway. We fart in their general direction.

And besides, we don't have the time. We're in a rush to war, after all.

Daniel Ellsberg sums up the situation nicely

The problem of conflict of interest with people's background, from the oil industry, for example, like Bush and Cheney, is not that they tell themselves, I'm acting for my corporate sponsors and from personal interests against the interests of the United States. Conflict of interest consists of the fact they can't see any difference between the interests of the U.S. and what they learned, as oil executives, was in the interest of the U.S., and of those corporations. That's why the Constitution so wisely said, don't let one man, elected man – or in this case almost elected man – decide the issue of war and peace. That should be the job of a more broadly representative body that will make it hard and reluctant to get into war. As Tom Payne said, "It is the pride of kings that throws mankind into confusion."

The problem is the process. The problem is the transformation of our government into a business. Our future shouldn't be for sale.

At least not at such a ridiculously low price.

So the grid communications talk was kind of a disappointment. Pretty much every one of these always seems to turn out the same way. There's a definite interesting pattern in this kind of large scale grid computing. Non programmers who are just trying to get their jobs done - in this case, the modeling of cell phone communication (or lack thereof, as any cell phone user knows) within a city using CDMA. It's a huge computational problem, the details of which are only interesting to electrical engineers and the companies - in this case Motorola - they work for. I can find interesting things in pretty much anything so I was amused, but most of my compatriots were rather bored.

The interesting gem of the first day of the conference turned out to be a rather fascinating little bit of urban planning software called UrbanSim. It's SimCity on steroids. And it's actually used in real life. Take a look at it. It's open source and written completely in Java so you can run it anywhere. Comes with data for Eugene/Springfield Oregon, so you can simulate the Simpsons - well, if that really IS the real Springfield...

Anyways, I have to go to a reception so I have to get going. Damn Hilton doesn't have wireless. But they do have blistering fast broadband access in the hotel rooms. Price sucks, but what the hey. It's a hotel.

Had a couple of great conversations regarding my theories of "Process Psychosis" in software organizations and I may have a good paper for next years OOPSLA - the "pattern" guys love this kind of stuff. James Coplien (Bell Labs) isn't here this year or I'd be bending his ear on what data he has on this stuff - he's really big into organizational patterns.

Thanks for dropping by, despite the lack of posting...

David Neiwert has an excellent post (no surprise) about the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act. Go read his post, as it's quite good.

Had a very long rant of my own regarding this issue, but I thought better of it and it's now lost to time. Just go read Dave. It's chilling enough (and he's a far better writer than I anyway).

And then get busy.

In a conversation on another blog, I was reminded of this anonymous July post to the PoliTech mailing list.

So we have two observations:

1. It would be easy for anyone wishing to massively disrupt society, to successfully attack the crucial infrastructure (and escape free.)
2. Suck attacks do not seem to occur. Instead we have (in the USA) one instance of spectacular, suicidal, localized destruction (WTC), and one instance of a generally disruptive (but politically targeted) biological attack. (The anthrax mailings.)

The only possible conclusion, is that there is simply no one seriously interested in committing major infrastructure attacks. And that implies there are actually no true (or even wannabe) 'terrorists' among us. And never have been.

Which in turn implies that all the actual and threatened attacks were not initiated by 'terrorists' (as advertised on TV), but by people with quite different motivations.

As for who they are, and their motivations, I notice the rest of the internet has a few things to say about that. However, it is curious to note that our governments, while doing their best to scare the citizenry with tales of impending attacks, and making a great show of upgrading security around high visibility 'targets', tend to be doing virtually nothing of substance to protect the _real_ soft and vulnerable spots of our society - the critical service infrastructure of the cities.

Its as if our governments are certain these targets will not be attacked. Which is quite fortunate, since the effort required to harden all that infrastructure, including things like the fiber optic lines, and create a truly 'secure society', would be astronomical. I suggest that the ideal of a 'secure society' would be completely beyond the realm of the possible. Physically, it would require the laws of thermodynamics to be suspended. (More energy needed to run the security apparatus than the rest of society.) Economically, nothing could be profitable under the burden of massive security system cost overheads.

Politically, it would require the elimination of almost all freedoms.

If there were any real terrorists, our entire western way of life would be untenable. The combination of technology and centralization makes us just too vulnerable to survive determined and creative attacks on our infrastructure.

Keep in mind this graph of terror statistics as well.

Well, flight was delayed getting out of SF. Plane was late and there's these wild fires down here in So Cal. . . Staying at this big frickin' Hilton hotel right outside of Disneyland. Should have figured. Well, I'll walk down main street and drink a beer to the artificial reality that is these United States.

Anyways, I saw one of the fires when the plane was landing. Big. Nasty. Ugly. Pilot had to come online and tell everyone the smoke was coming from OUTSIDE the plane, so don't be alarmed.

<heh>

Well, off to Kevin Drum's house for some late night blogging.

Oh wait! He doesn't have a frickin' clue who I am!

<heh>

On to dinner.

Check them out.

Let's hope they live up to the talk.

Be sure to put your tin foil hat on for this. Serious fun for all the family!

As everyone knows, on 11 September, less than an hour after the attack on the World Trade Centre, an airplane collided with the Pentagon. The Associated Press first reported that a booby-trapped truck had caused the explosion. The Pentagon quickly denied this. The official US government version of events still holds. Here's a little game for you: Take a look at these photographs and try to find evidence to corroborate the official version. It's up to you to Hunt the Boeing!

Sure, all the PoliSci types have their wonderful wonk fests. But I get to go to OOPSLA - Object Oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications. Haven't attended for the last 5 years, so it'll be great to schmooze with old friends and discuss the finer points of typed lambda calculus, partial ordering of messages in a byzantine system with spurious network partitions, contravariance vs. covariance in interface contracts, and of course, my favorite all time topic - Garbage Collection. Garbage collection, and in particular, distributed garbage collection, comes as close to anything - including philosophy - to understanding the Dharma Cycle of the Universe.

Some sessions I'm looking forward to:

10 Days of Shame: A Countdown of the Low Points in the Bush Presidency

J Nelson W lets off some steam. My favorite (if I can use that term ironically)

Sept. 22, 2003 On this day, Bush gave an interview for FOX news in which the following was revealed:

Bush was asked how he gets his news. Answer: He relies on briefings by chief of staff Andrew Card and national security affairs adviser Condoleezza Rice.

He walks into the Oval Office in the morning, Bush said, and asks Card: "What's in the newspapers worth worrying about? I glance at the headlines just to kind of (get) a flavor of what's moving," Bush said. "I rarely read the stories," he said

He goes on to explain that he doesn't read newspapers because the news, as filtered by his staff, is more "objective". This assertion, of course, is patently absurd, and it's disheartening to have the president's total lack of intellectual curiosity confirmed.

Now, in and of itself, you may not think that this was that significant; but I've put it on the list because it ties together and explains so many other events I thought about including. For example, in a press conference Bush once said that we went to war because "we gave [Saddam] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in"; at another point he said, of Iraq's WMD, "We found them".

Both these statements preceded Bush's no-newspaper confession, so at the time I was really confused. Was he crazy or just an incredibly bold liar? After this day, however, I realized, "Oh, he's just committed to living in an ignorant fantasy world of his staff's devising". Sadly, it's not just strange quotes that this explains, but also bizarre policy decisions that seem similarly disconnected from reality.

So, since Friday we've had a staggering series of attacks in Iraq leaving dozens dead - Wolfowitz was almost among them.

All of this barely registers a peep on the bloggers to the right of me.

Weird. I guess if you simply don't admit it's happening, then it's not happening.

If anything reminds me of Vietnam in this situation, it's the staggering level of cognitive dissonance between the rhetoric and the reality.

From Stratfor.

It wasn't a great weekend for the United States in Iraq. On Oct. 25, a rocket-propelled grenade apparently shot down a Black Hawk helicopter. Then on Oct. 26, rockets hit the Rashid Hotel, the temporary home of U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, killing one U.S. Army officer and wounding several other residents.

What is most interesting about the Rashid attack is its sophistication. Guerrillas fired the rockets from about 400 yards away, using a launcher disguised as a power generator. The launcher was said to be on a blue trailer parked on a side street a few minutes before the attack. The rockets were launched using a timer, allowing the guerrillas to get away before the attack. The launcher reportedly was booby-trapped, but U.S. troops disarmed it without injury. About Azaelf of the weapons failed to fire, leaving about 11 rockets in the launcher. Had the system worked more effectively, U.S. casualties obviously would have been substantially higher. We note that the downing of the Black Hawk near Tikrit came just hours after Wolfowitz flew out of the city in a chopper. That's another coincidence, we guess.

Over 200 Are Wounded at Red Cross and 4 Iraqi Police Posts

When will this madness end?

Car bomb rocks central Baghdad

A powerful car bomb exploded in central Baghdad early Monday outside the Red Cross headquarters. Vehicles left ablaze by the blast sent huge clouds of black smoke into the air.

Coalition forces cordoned off the scene. There were no immediate reports on casualties.

A second explosion, in another part of the Iraqi capital, occurred several minutes after the first. It was not known whether the two blasts were related.

Wolfowitz: Service in Baghdad Hotel "Much Better Than You'd Think"

Just a reminder. MIT's Opengov is getting features on line and it's looking pretty cool. . . It'll be invaluable.

In the United States, there is a widening gap between a citizen's ability to monitor his or her government and the government's ability to monitor a citizen. Average citizens have limited access to important government records, while available information is often illegible. Meanwhile, the government's eagerness and means to oversee a citizen's personal activity is rapidly increasing.

As the government broadens internal surveillance, and collaborates with private institutions to access data on the public, it is crucial that we maintain a symmetry of accountability. If we believe the United States should be a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" it is of central importance to provide citizens with the power to oversee their government. At least as much effort should be spent building tools to facilitate citizens supervising their government as tools to help the government monitor individuals.

Libertarian Psychosis

<heh>

Right-wing libertarians like Bernstein don't like the idea that the government sometimes needs to intervene in individuals' private choices in order to secure the civil rights of others. But it's something that happens all the time. Just as we wouldn't expect the government to stand idly by while some people tried to keep others from, say, voting at the polls, we wouldn't expect the government to do nothing while some people dramatically limit others' ability to obtain education, jobs, or housing, or to participate in commerce. Bernstein says that is exactly what we must do, and would turn back the clock on decades of social progress as a result.

Also, looks like Steven is back from a working hiatus.

So I'm watching today's Meet The Press, and they're opening with the rocket attack on the Baghdad hotel where Wolfowitz is staying. In the video, they're showing some of the chaos with Wolfowitz looking like he's in a state of shock.

Anyways, this guy comes on camera and they pixelate the guy's face so you can't see who it is.

What the f*ck is up with that? Who in the heck is this individual?

Anyways, weird.

Update: Don't think it could have to do with techology like this, do you?

Inevitable failure.

The president is betting that the winds of allegiance can and will shift in his favor and he likely chose Muttawakil because he is the most senior Taliban official in custody who is willing to strike a deal. Karzai -- and his supporters in Washington -- know they cannot beat the Taliban militarily and so are now trying to outflank the guerrilla group politically by fracturing it from within.

However, choosing Muttawakil as a means for winning support among the Pushtun is a sign of desperation, as he does not have the support of the Taliban rank and file.

...

Muttawakil also is too closely connected with the U.S. and Karzai governments to have any credibility among the Pushtun tribes. The Taliban can easily play the "erosion of culture" card against Muttawakil and the regime in Kabul to counter potential dissent within the ranks.

A surge in guerrilla fighting and the upcoming elections has set the clock ticking for Karzai. Both Kabul and Washington know that eventually the Taliban and its allies must be either beaten or co-opted, hence Kabul's ploy to woo the more moderate elements. However, the honey Karzai is offering -- Muttawakil -- won't be sweet enough to attract Taliban fighters from the field.

I was struck by this little bit in the NY Times piece on the CIA's response to Senator Robert's previous shot across the CIA's bow.

"When you get all done parsing this, what you find is a compelling case that no reasonable person could have concluded anything other than what we have" about Iraq's weapons program, based on the information available at the time, a second senior intelligence officials said.

What we wrote was exactly what Dick Cheney told us to write. No one can read the NIE and get the idea that we didn't paint a very scary picture of Saddam and Al Qaeda. The fact that it bore no resemblance to reality doesn't negate the fact that no one could have read the NIE and NOT come away with a deeply held belief that Saddam could have WMDs within 6 months. It's simply not possible. Our fad king spent weeks on that thing. The customer got precisely what it wanted to see.

Boy, the flips are coming furious. Or is it a flop. No doubt this will go back and forth a couple of times before the Great Oz settles on a plan. But boy, this is sure fun to see.

Roberts defends war but unsure Congress would have supported it

Although he defended the war in Iraq, U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts said Saturday he is not sure Congress would have authorized force based on the evidence it now has about Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction.

Roberts said he is concerned that U.S. weapons inspectors led by David Kay have not found actual weapons, though Roberts believes Saddam had a weapons program and managed to conceal it.

The Kansas Republican said his committee has not finished a report from its examination of prewar intelligence, contrary to a published article that said the panel is preparing a report highly critical of the intelligence.

Roberts said in a statement Friday that remarks he made to a Washington Post reporter were "mischaracterized" and quipped Saturday, "That means you shouldn't have talked to the reporter."

Gay marriage looms as issue

Republican lawmakers and conservative activists are making plans to turn gay marriage into a major issue in next year’s elections, with some Christian groups saying that banning same-sex unions is a higher immediate priority for them than restricting abortion.

And so 2004 is shaping up to be a battle between the Christian Right and the rest of us. Sure national security and the economy will be playing a big role, but everything will be framed as a religious war. Immorality. Good vs. Evil. You know. Real old testament stuff.

So what's it going to be guys? I'm pretty sure I know where Kristof stands...

For me the implication, if these studies are to believed, is different: It is that something is defective not in gays, but in discrimination against them.

It'll be very interesting to see what Sully and his "independent" type of sympathizers choose.

I have a nickle on the table that people will value ideology over reality.

After all, it's a matter of "faith".

How to Change the News on Iraq

Overall, 38 percent of Americans thought the news was making the Iraqi situation seem worse than reality, 14 percent thought news portrayals were making things seem better, and 36 percent thought the reports were about right.

But check this out: 55 percent of those who said the Fox News Channel was their main source of news said the newsies were making things seem worse, compared with only 32 percent of CNN viewers.

Are those folks at Fox News a collection of nattering nabobs of negativism? Of course not. People's views of whether Bush is right or wrong about the news have little do what with what they are seeing or reading and a lot to do with their political preconceptions.

The audience for Fox News, as the poll found, is significantly more Republican than the rest of the nation. And sure enough, Fox viewers' attitudes closely match those of Republicans, 55 percent of whom also see the media as portraying the reality in Iraq too negatively. On the other hand, CNN viewers -- and, as it happens, newspaper readers -- held views on reporting from Iraq similar to those of Americans as a whole.

Read the whole column, though. It's pretty good.

C.I.A. Disputes Accusations That Its Prewar Conclusions on Iraq Arms Were Flawed

Note the narrative. This is beautiful.

Over the course of two hours, the senior intelligence officials sought to rebut comments by Senator Roberts and others claiming that the intelligence agencies' conclusions in an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate had been based on incomplete and circumstantial evidence.

"When you get all done parsing this, what you find is a compelling case that no reasonable person could have concluded anything other than what we have" about Iraq's weapons program, based on the information available at the time, a second senior intelligence officials said.

But Congressional officials said the timing and nature of the conclusions may be affected by opposition from Democrats. The Democrats say the committee still has not been able to review evidence that might shed light on the possible misuse of intelligence by Bush administration officials, as opposed to errors made by intelligence analysts.

The Democrats fear that Senator Roberts and other Republicans on the panel want to blame the C.I.A. for producing faulty intelligence on Iraq to shield President Bush and his top advisers from charges that they exaggerated the Iraqi threat.

Arctic ice cap melting at worrying rate: NASA

The polar ice cap is melting at an alarming rate due to global warming (news - web sites), according to NASA (news - web sites) scientists, with satellite images showing the ice cap has been shrinking by 10 percent per decade over the past quarter century.

"It is happening now. We cannot afford to wait a long period of time for technological solutions," said David Rind of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

"Change is in the air -- literally," he told a press conference here Thursday.

Volunteers had brain scan during sex for experiment

Volunteers agreed to have sex while having their brains scanned for a Dutch scientific study.

They had to keep their heads perfectly still while having sex and had to finish within seven minutes.

The experiments were part of a study by researchers at Groningen University into sexual problems.

Professor Marc Holstege said the PET-scan would not have worked if the volunteers had not managed to meet the conditions.

He told De Telegraaf: "But as we asked them all to practise before the scan was made, they all succeeded. The men were also asked to ejaculate within seven minutes. And that was no problem at all either."

Among the study's findings was that an orgasm has the same effect on the brain as a dose of heroin.

Prof Holstege said the results of this survey could help develop a medicine to treat people with mental sexual problems in the same way that viagra helps people with physical problems.

I believe that Rumsfeld is offering bridges and swamp land at a bargain rate as well.

Rumsfeld says US needs new agency to fight "war of ideas"

The United States needs to communicate its messages more effectively in the war against terrorism and a new information agency would help fight a "war of ideas," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has suggested.

　　"We are in a war of ideas, as well as a global war on terror," Rumsfeld said in an interview with The Washington Times published Friday. "And the ideas are important ... they need to be communicated in ways that are persuasive to the listeners."

　　He made the remarks when asked to comment on a leaked memo he sent to top Pentagon officials last week. Questioning the progress in the US campaign against international terrorism, Rumsfeld referred three times in the memo to the danger from religious schools in the Islamic world.

　　"The overwhelming majority of the people of all religions don't believe in terrorism," he said in the interview. "They don't believe in running around killing innocent men, women and children. And we need more people standing up and saying that in the world, not just us."

　　Rumsfeld said that creating a post for an undersecretary for intelligence in the Pentagon and merging agencies into the Homeland Security Department were bold steps, but more can be done.

　　He suggested a "21st century information agency in the government" to help in the international battle of ideas, to limit the teaching of terrorism and extremism, and to provide better education.

　　Last year, Rumsfeld was forced to close a clandestine "Office of Strategic Influence" in the Pentagon after wide criticism arose following newspaper reports that the office would issue false information abroad to influence public sentiment and policy makers in other countries.

Sick of war and violence and BushCo reaming the planet every day? Only one thing you can really do

Reproduced here because I like it so much.

Everyone wants to know what they can do to counteract.

Everyone wants to know how they can join the revolt and punch a hole in the toxic BushCo bubble and deflect the bloated dumbed-down Wal-Mart-ization of the culture, and resist being soaked all the way through to the bone with the sad notion that this country really is jammed to the blindly patriotic gills with misguided terrified fools and simpletons and gun nuts, drunk on rabid GOP spin and Adam Sandler movies and generic Paxil.

This is what I get asked, all the time: What can I do? How can I fight this poisonous miasma of hate and violence and hollow BushCo smirks? Is this country really this blind? What has happened to us? Should I move to Canada? What the hell is wrong with Celine Dion?

After all (they say to me), I write my senator and I sign petitions and send thoughtful angry e-mails, I educate myself and pay attention and am loaded to the goddamn brim with all the proofs I can stomach of BushCo's appalling lies and environmental atrocities and disgusting abuses of this gorgeous nation.

And I participate in marches and I breathe deeply and hang my head in shame when I watch the news, what with its astounding pornographic cavalcade of deeply embarrassing macabre schlock infotainment bickering bloodletting violence violence violence with a cute story about puppies at the very end to make it all better.

And, indeed, it can seem relentless, the onslaught, the toxic stew, reducing you to bitterness and hopelessness, making you ask impossible questions of Fate and the universe, such as, Why George Plimpton and Edward Said and John Ritter and not, say, Karl Rove or John Ashcroft or that guy I read about who beats his dogs? Is that too much to ask?

Tell me again that it's all just okay and that they really don't want to install a religious state. Go on. Tell me. I dare ya.

Victory in Florida Feeding Case Emboldens the Religious Right

Religious conservatives say that with an arsenal of prayer vigils, Christian radio broadcasts and thousands of e-mail messages to Florida lawmakers, they played a pivotal role in the legislative battle this week over whether to feed a brain-damaged woman who has been kept alive artificially for 13 years.

Now some conservatives are hoping to use similar tactics to help them cAzaellenge court rulings they opposed in other states.

Randall Terry, founder of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, said he and other conservatives intended to use what they consider a stunning victory here to pressure lawmakers elsewhere to chip away at court rulings allowing abortion and banning organized prayer in schools and the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools, among other issues.

"Finally, a governor and legislature had the courage to stand up to judicial despots because of an overwhelming call by the public," Mr. Terry said.

The Tax Policy of Hate

When high school students who sit next to each other give the same wrong answer it is a sign of foul play. In a similar manner, the fact that Democratic candidates all have converged to the same tax policy is a sign of foul motive. Rational analysis can not explain their policy proposals. Only hatred of Bush can.

Cover-Up Alleged in Probe of USS Liberty

A former Navy attorney who helped lead the military investigation of the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty that killed 34 American servicemen says former President Lyndon Johnson and his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, ordered that the inquiry conclude the incident was an accident.

In a signed affidavit released at a Capitol Hill news conference, retired Capt. Ward Boston said Johnson and McNamara told those heading the Navy's inquiry to "conclude that the attack was a case of 'mistaken identity' despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary."

Boston was senior legal counsel to the Navy's original 1967 review of the attack. He said in the sworn statement that he stayed silent for years because he's a military man, and "when orders come ... I follow them."

He said he felt compelled to "share the truth" following the publication of a recent book, "The Liberty Incident," which concluded the attack was unintentional.

The USS Liberty was an electronic intelligence-gathering ship that was cruising international waters off the Egyptian coast on June 8, 1967. Israeli planes and torpedo boats opened fire on the Liberty in the midst of what became known as the Israeli-Arab Six-Day War.

In addition to the 34 Americans killed, more than 170 were wounded.

Israel has long maintained that the attack was a case of mistaken identity, an explanation that the Johnson administration did not formally cAzaellenge. Israel claimed its forces thought the ship was an Egyptian vessel and apologized to the United States.

After the attack, a Navy court of inquiry concluded there was insufficient information to make a judgment about why Israel attacked the ship, stopping short of assigning blame or determining whether it was an accident.

It was "one of the classic all-American cover-ups," said Ret. Adm. Thomas Moorer, a former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman who spent a year investigating the attack as part of an independent panel he formed with other former military officials. The panel also included a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James Akins.

"Why in the world would our government put Israel's interest ahead of our own?" Moorer asked from his wheelchair at the news conference. He was chief of naval operations at the time of the attack.

Moorer, who has long held that the attack was a deliberate act, wants Congress to investigate.

Israeli Embassy spokesman Mark Regev disputed any notion that Israel knowingly went after American sailors.

"I can say unequivocally that the Liberty tragedy was a terrible accident, that the Israeli pilots involved believed they were attacking an enemy ship," Regev said. "This was in the middle of a war. This is something that we are not proud of."

Calls to the Navy seeking comment were not immediately returned.

David Lewis of Lemington, Vt., was on the Liberty when it was attacked. In an interview, he said Israel had to know it was targeting an American ship. He said a U.S. flag was flying that day and Israel shot it full of holes. The sailors on the ship, he said, quickly hoisted another American flag, a much bigger one, to show Israel it was a U.S. vessel.

"No trained individual could be that inept," said Lewis of the Israeli forces.

In Capt. Boston's statement, he does not say why Johnson would have ordered a cover-up. Later in a phone interview from his home in Coronado, Calif., Boston said Johnson may have worried the inquiry would hurt him politically with Jewish voters.

Moorer's panel suggested several possible reasons Israel might have wanted to attack a U.S. ship. Among them: Israel intended to sink the ship and blame Egypt because it might have brought the United States into the 1967 war.

Time to break out my solar filter for my telescope and do some sun spot watching.

Strong Geomagnetic Storm Expected to Hit Earth Friday

A strong geomagnetic (search) storm was expected to hit Earth on Friday with the potential to affect electrical grids and satellite communications.

One of the largest sunspot (search) clusters in years developed over the past three days and produced a coronal mass ejection, similar to a solar flare, at 3 a.m. EDT Wednesday, forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (search) said.

The disturbance was expected to produce a geomagnetic storm rated G3. A G5 storm is the strongest.

The storm could make the aurora visible as far south as Oregon and Illinois.

A coronal mass ejection is an explosion of gas and charged particles into space from the corona, the outermost layer of the sun's atmosphere.

A second sunspot cluster not yet visible from Earth could produce more geomagnetic storms in the next two weeks, NOAA said.

The war that could destroy both armies

The New York Times in an October 5 editorial titled "An overstretched army in Iraq" began with the sentence: "Now that it is clear the United States faces a lengthy military occupation of Iraq, requiring perhaps 100,000 troops for the foreseeable future, it is possible to begin calculating how the war may damage the American armed forces." It went on to warn that "the burden of occupation will start to strain severely the army's capacity to deploy trained and rested combat forces worldwide in a matter of months".

For the long term, not only will the lives of thousands of military families be disrupted, the army reserve system behind the United States' move to a smaller, volunteer army three decades ago will be put at severe risk and "the global reach of American foreign policy will almost inevitably be diminished", said the Times. Nearly Azaelf of the army's 33 combat brigades are now in continuous harm's way in the Persian Gulf region. Replacing all of them with fresh units would leave the army hard-pressed to meet its obligations elsewhere, including Afghanistan and the Korean Peninsula.

A congressional study last month found that unless major adjustments are made, the army will be forced to shrink its occupation force to less than Azaelf, including cutting "other international commitments". The Iraq War shows that a superpower empire cannot be maintained without a massive occupational force, something that the US lacks. The Times observed that this is "another regrettable consequence of the unilateral way America went to war in Iraq".

A reader wrote on April 7: "If you want Asia Times Online to be taken seriously, you might want to consider not using any more items from Henry C K Liu [The war that may end the age of superpower, Apr 5]...Suggestion: Reread his article six months from now as a test of his ability to prognosticate."

Six months have passed and I repeat: This war may end the age of superpower.

Interesting contrasting the various viewpoints about the "leaked" memo. Liberal Oasis has a great post up about it, with their analysis. Of course, so does stratfor.

This memo confirms what we've always suspected -- Rumsfeld's public persona and his own evaluation of reality are very different. Part of the pressure to move Rumsfeld aside as the dominant personality in the war came from the perception that he could not admit to the unanticipated problems in Iraq. For us, at least, this posed a serious crisis of confidence in him. If the man couldn't see the problems, he couldn't possibly fix them. In the end, President George W. Bush kept him on board, but reshuffled the deck -- slipping in National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice over him on Iraq and Afghanistan.

This memo is Rumsfeld's reply. In it, he states his awareness of the serious problems and convenes his senior civilian and military staff to consider methods of dealing with them. He also acknowledges that the problems are deeply rooted and require fundamental rethinking of how the United States will fight this war. There is an implicit political message here -- Rumsfeld knew this all along, but maintained his cheerleader attitude to play the role the administration assigned to him. Therefore, the memo implies, it is unfair to blame him for the problems, since he had always known them.

On this score, Rumsfeld is undoubtedly telling the truth. He is an extraordinarily capable man, and those of far less capacity -- like us -- knew there were serious problems. He knew it as well, and has now stated the problem very clearly. After Pearl Harbor, a fundamental rethinking took place on ways to fight that war. Commanders were retired and reassigned; the services' institutional frameworks were redefined. After Sept. 11, there were no fundamental changes -- not in people or institutions.

Worse yet, the peacetime process inside the Department of Defense continued to manage procurement, personnel and most other issues. A global war was being managed by a peacetime entity. This "business as usual" approach resulted in a range of problems -- from intelligence failures to manpower shortages to misallocation. Rumsfeld's most important point is whether the Defense Department is capable of fighting a war like this, or whether an entirely new entity must be created to do so.

This is a breath of fresh air. Rather than stale optimism, Rumsfeld is grappling with the fundamental question. This war -- like every other war ever fought -- is different from what went before. The Defense Department was configured to fight the war that never happened, and it also fought -- though not particularly well -- a series of other wars that needed fighting, such as Korea and Vietnam. The department's basic structure has not changed, in spite of the fact that the Cold War is long over, and the U.S.-Islamist war bears no resemblance to it. The same planning and administrative mechanisms built to fight the Cold War are trying to fight this one. As a result, the forces available for this war look remarkably like those designed to defend the north German plain. This probably won't work.

Just so's you know, Glenn Reynolds is a Moron.

Gaining Traction and Reclaiming the Initiative

Fourth quarter forcast. Pretty long, as one might expect. Here's a taste of the Iraq section.

The single most important event of the third Quarter was unexpected: the ability of the Iraqis to continue waging guerrilla war after the destruction of their conventional forces and the fall of Baghdad. Although Stratfor had discussed the possibility that Saddam Hussein had made plans for resistance after the fall of Baghdad, we had focused on a national redoubt strategy, assuming that conducting a guerrilla war in Iraq's terrain would be too difficult. Our assumption on that was wrong -- the Iraqis indeed had plans for continuing the war, but it was a guerrilla war, not a territorial resistance.

The Iraqi war is not as militarily significant as has been portrayed, for the very reasons we had rejected this option. It is extremely difficult for Iraqi forces to transit from the type and tempo of operations they currently maintain, to a more threatening operational model that involves larger units and at least temporary seizure of territory. The terrain and the correlation of forces seem to preclude this. Therefore, it is our view that from a military standpoint, the guerrilla war is self-containing. It will be difficult to eradicate it, but it will also be difficult to either expand it geographically or intensify it within the Sunni region.

The war nevertheless has a profound effect on the geopolitical balance. The military reality is one thing; the perception of the war is another. Since this war was fought in part to allay the image of the United States as unable to deal decisively with military threats, the fact that the United States cannot close off the Iraq war decisively is geopolitically significant. It leaves the Islamists in a position to claim that the United States is weaker than it pretends to be, and makes coalition-building within the Islamic world even more difficult.

It follows from this that the United States, unable to shut down the guerrilla war this quarter, will look for ways to move beyond it. The United States is in an election cycle, which clearly affects the tempo at which the Bush administration needs to move. However, even without an election, the United States will have to move quickly to limit the psychological effects of the guerrilla war. It will have to show that it remains a regional power -- and threat -- in spite of the war. Otherwise, a relatively insignificant conflict, from a military standpoint, can have significant political consequences.

Kimberly over at Brief Intelligence has provided an interesting perspective on Lt. General Boykin and the mess that he's in.

Still, it appears to me that Lt. Gen. Boykin very much values his personal and professional integrity and reputation. Now, it clearly violates Army regulations (670-1) for Lt. Gen. Boykin to have appeared in uniform while making those speeches and announcing religious convictions for the whole of our country, in violation of the Constitution he was sworn to defend, if, that is if, his behaviour had not been previously “authorized by competent authority”. But Lt. Gen. Boykin issued no apology for violating Army regulations or dishonoring the Army with his sloppy interpretation of what those regulations mean--in the censored or uncensored versions of his attempt to explain himself and extend a polite hand to American Muslims. I find that incredibly strange. Apologizing for violating Army regulations, at least in theory, is perhaps the one thing a man of his religious conviction and distinguished service should have been instinctively compelled to be repentant for. In fact, the language of his acknowledgment on this point, ‘[T]he sensitivities of my job today dictate that further church speeches are inappropriate,’ is not so much an expression of regret as it is an announcement of policy change.

Given the fact that I find Lt. Gen. Boykin’s forthcoming attempts to explain his actions impressive thus far, I think this may very well indicate that he had been given tacit if not explicit authorization to do what he was doing. Given the fact that this administration relies so heavily on the pernicious tools of propaganda, I’m near certain they’d give him the nod to stir up the religious right with his seemingly official pronouncements of being locked in battle with that old familiar boogie-man “Satan”.

Lt. Gen. Boykin looks, to me, like a zealously religious man who allowed himself to be misused for propaganda because it suited his own personal conviction and then took the fall for an administration and the Pentagon when the public decided to take a pass on starting another Crusade.

Now the heat is on and people are clamoring for a head on a plate. I have an overwhelming hunch that many people that have heretofore been unable to touch the plethora of low-lifes in Bush’s obstinate administration have decided that they can get at Boykin, so tearing him down will just have to do. There’s virtually no other way to check the growing audacity of Bush and Co.

I actually got a collection of essays by Richard Hofstadter of the same title, but I found this essay squirreled away on the net here.

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wind. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics., In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.

Anyways, give it a read. You'll enjoy it.

My growing addiction to Civilization III is getting the better of my blogging.

I must say, though, that the better game is really Sim City 4. This is really a huge step up from previous versions. All I've been able to do is watch over my wife's shoulder while she's playing, but from what I've been able to see it's fantastic.

First, the maps are now huge - they even have a pre-made SF Bay area terrain map. Very cool. And they seem to have gone crazy with the detail. You can add fauna and see the cute little animals romp around your simulation. Rather than just coarse grained Industrial/Commercial/Residential zoning, they have Heavy/Light Polluting and high tech industrial settings. Residential can be low income, high income, etc. It's a lot to take in all at once, but the upshot is that the folks who produce this simulation have been very busy.

We got the package set that includes "Rush Hour", which allows you to drive through your city to see what the Sims are experiencing. Very cool. Also, if you're into the Sims, apparently you can import them into the Sim City simulation and then experience the every day life of your fine creation from their viewpoint.

All in all, a very cool game.

Anyways, back to reading the news and figuring out what the heck the inmates are doing in the insane asylum that is our own simulation. Life imitates computer games.

T. Bevan makes a rather entertaining (if inane) contrast between Greg Easterbrook's exercise of free speech and Howard Dean's comment before an Arab-American audience in Detroit.

Now let's do a thought experiment and compare and contrast the Easterbrook affair with something Howard Dean said the other day. Speaking before an Arab-American audience in Detroit, Dean pointed to the American flag and said:

"It does not belong to General Boykin, or John Ashcroft, or Rush Limbaugh or Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson."

Dean received a standing ovation. More importantly, Dean's attack on the religious faith of the men didn't even cause the slightest fuss in the press. Not a thing.

Now imagine if Dean had pointed to the American flag and said:

"It does not belong to Michael Eisner or Harvey Weinstein or Alan Dershowitz or Joe Lieberman."

The striking thing that Tom Bevan doesn't seem to notice at all is that Dean is talking about specific individuals. Dean is not using the broad brush of religious identity Easterbrook was when he said this

Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice.

I N D I V I D U A L S.

But it's clear the distinction is lost on Bevan.

Meanwhile, a candidate for President of the United States launches an attack on evangelical Christians and receives praise from his audience and a collective shrug of the shoulders from the press corps. And instead of threatening to ruin Dean's political career, continuing to bash evangelical Christians will probably help him win the nomination.

But just think about this for a second. Dean isn't even attacking what the individuals believe as evangelical Christians. He isn't even attacking what they said or did. What he actually said was that the flag (or nation) doesn't belong to these individuals. He was simply saying these individuals don't speak for our nation. Dean didn't even attack what they said, merely pointing out that their views were not even the unofficial views of this nation - much less the official views.

And this point is clearly lost on Bevan. And perhaps, as well, on the rest of the "right".

So someone should sit Tom Bevan down for a long talk about demagoguery and conflation and other enemies of logical discourse. Because from this post of his, it's clear that he doesn't understand the concept at all.

Well, my site host went on the blink, and now the computer has time warped to Sept 10, 2004. So things are a little bit odd - so to speak.

Sorry for the technical difficulties. Hopefully this will be resolved soon.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the toy store...

Preorder yours now!

It is a talking doll and comes with such classic phrases as

"Liberals can't come right out and say that they want to take more of our money, kill babies and discriminate on the basis of race."

"At least when right wingers rant, there's a point!"

"Swing voters are more appropriately known as the idiot voters because they have no set of philosophical principles. By the age of 14, you're either a conservative or a liberal if you have an IQ above a toaster."

"Why not go to war just for oil? We need oil! What do Hollywood celebrities imagine fuels their private jets? How do they think their cocaine is delivered to them?"

"Liberals hat America, they hate flag-wavers, they hate abortion opponents, they hate all religions except Islam - post 9/11. Even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like liberals do - they don't have the energy. If they had that much energy they'd have indoor plumbing by now."

The Case for War

I have no logic for what we did. I have no explanation for why it was done. But drawing from my vast experience in prison, fictional westerns and third grade playground politics, I conclude we were completely justified in getting tangled up in this tarbaby called Iraq.

Greg Thielman and David Azaelberstam on my local PBS station, KQED. Here's the main link to the program. The link to the audio isn't up yet, as it's the 9:00 program. But should be up soon. I'll update later with the audio link.

From Stratfor.

It is important to note bin Laden's opening statement: "Some have the impression that you are a reasonable people. But the majority of you are vulgar and without sound ethics or good manners. You elect the evil from among you, the greatest liars and the least decent and you are enslaved by your richest and the most influential among you, especially the Jews, who lead you using the lie of democracy to support the Israelis and their schemes and in complete antagonism towards our religion." It would appear that this is, if anything, an intensification of his anti-Americanism. Earlier statements seemed to draw a distinction between the U.S. government and its ruling class and the U.S. public. In this statement, he appears to treat all U.S. citizens as the same.

As a practical matter, it probably doesn't make a whole lot of difference. However, in rejecting the very idea of the United States as "reasonable," bin Laden makes it clear that no accommodation is possible and that the distinction between military and civilian in the United States is not meaningful to him. He also makes clear that another attack is coming, somewhere on the targets he has named -- and we suspect soon.

Torture now routine for Putin's police

Once the policeman's gas mask was sealed tight around his face, Denis, 18, lasted 90 seconds before passing out. After a heavy beating by police fists and batons, Denis had still not confessed to stealing a car radio from a garage near his home. So two officers handcuffed his hands behind his back and clamped the 'elephant mask', as it is called, to his bruised head. They shut its valves and then waited.
'I thought it was all over, that I was going to die,' said Denis, a hardy car mechanic whose experience of police torture has left him unable to walk the streets without a gang of friends by his side.

Once the detainee was unconscious, the militsia, as the Russian police are known, panicked and dumped him in a cell. After he regained consciousness, he had still not signed a confession, so the police gave up and released him.

His friend Artur, who was arrested for the same alleged crime and beaten in the next room, was less resilient. He had heard people can die in police cells and so signed a confession prepared for him by the police after two doses of the 'elephant mask'.

Denis and Artur are two young victims of Russian police torture, which human rights groups say is spiralling out of control. An investigation by The Observer has established that boys as young as 16 are being tortured with electric shocks, asphyxiation and heavy beating in order to extract confessions. Poorly paid and ill-disciplined police, under pressure from Ministers to keep crime clear-up rates high, are resorting to any means to get confessions.

...

He said Russian law did not list torture as a crime and so police were tried for the minor crime of 'abuse of office'. The longest sentence he had heard of was five years for electric shock torture.

From the horse's mouth, so to speak.

Abandon Your Follies And Rein In Your Fools

UCSD scientists explain and improve upon 'enigmatic' probability formula

Okay, I'm really freaking out (in a good way). Doing the snoopy dance in my mind. This is directly applicable to some things that I actually do in the (somewhat) real world. If this pans out, data mining is going to get a heck of a lot more interesting.

Timely and quite fascinating.

Since then, Good-Turing has been incorporated into a variety of applications such as information retrieval, spell-checking, and speech recognition software, where it is used to learn automatically the underlying structure of the language. But despite its usefulness, "its performance has remained something of an enigma itself," said Orlitsky, a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. While some partial explanations were given as to why Good-Turing may work well, no objective evaluation or results have been established for its optimality. Additionally, scientists observed that while it worked well under many circumstances, at times, its performance was lacking.

Now, Orlitsky, Santhanam, and Zhang believe they have unraveled some of the mystery surrounding Good-Turing, and constructed a new estimator that, unlike the historic formula, is reliable under all conditions. Motivated by information-theoretic and machine-learning considerations, they propose a natural measure for the performance of an estimator. Called attenuation, it evaluates the highest possible ratio between the probability assigned to each symbol in a sequence by any distribution, and the corresponding probability assigned by the estimator.

Here's the link to the HTML version of the paper, and here's the link to the supplemental material.

Do not be alarmed. Please return your tray and move your seat into the upright, locked position. We may be experiencing some turbulence ahead. The pilot has turned on the fasten seatbelt light and the stewards will be passing through the isles ensuring that everyone has the belt fastened low, across the waist.

Via sotto at the Left Coaster I hear rather entertaining rumors about "the wheels are about to come off” inside the White House. Now I know it's all the fashion to characterize such feelings of joy at seeing the misfortune of this Administration as uncivil, rude, crude and probably cancer causing. Considering we're in a very dangerous global situation (n. korea, iraq, etc, etc, etc), it's even dangerous to have this kind of shit going on. Many on the right have even come right out and said as much, turning a blind eye to the crap that's been going on inside the White House.

But people are wising up.

Mendacious, stupid, disorganized, backstabbing, incompetent, malevolent--it's all there in these judgments of the Bush administration. And that's just what he's written in the past two weeks. Daniel Drezner's views have caught up--and it's now clear that the disagreement wasn't because Paul Krugman didn't know how politics really works, but because Dan Drezner had a lot of illusions about the Bush administration.

The problem is that this Administration is "mendacious, stupid, disorganized, backstabbing, incompetent, malevolent" and it's imperative to our democracy to get them out of there - the next election won't come too soon in my mind. And it's not so much that I think it's a Republican/Democrat thing.

No. This is a Dot Com CEO kind of thing. This is about whether or not it's a good idea to run our country like Kenneth Lay and his band of merry men ran Enron. You know. Except the gang of pirates now have nuclear bombs, kick ass special forces, stealth planes and the most powerful military the planet has ever seen. Running around pre-emptive-emptively overthrowing regimes n' such. Threatening others. Refusing to negotiate with other very dangerous ones.

It should offend everyone.

I know it's pretty quaint to compare the Bush Administration with the likes of CEOs from such famed companies as Tycho, WorldCom, GlobalCrossing, Enron and pretty much every zero product Dot Com of the '90's, but hoo boy does it fit. These guys are the profile.

So, quaint or not, it's an apt analogy.

Maybe after all this mess is over and we're spraying off the seats with fire hoses after the collective right's head pops we can tone down some of the CEO worship and the whole Adam Smith rules the Universe thing. You know, the hierarchical, corporate, "Trust Us", my country -right or wrong kind of thing.

Yes, I'm quite aware that the intersection between the skills need to govern people and the skills needed to be a ruthless capitalist is non trivial. Organizing humans effectively is pretty darn useful even if you are Satan incarnate (and no, captialism isn't evil. geesh).

But it would be kind of nice to see a toning down of Capitalism == Liberal Democracy thing. There's nothing wrong with applying markets to government functions where it makes good policy sense.

But I'll be damned if I'm going to be ruled by a market and by some of the more nastier corporate parasites that live off the markets we have in this country. Give me good old fashioned, inefficient liberal democracy any day of the week.

Capitalism is a powerful tool of a liberal democracy. Not the other way around.

Eight Marine reservists under investigation for mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners-of-war

Eight Marine reservists accused in the mistreatment of prisoners of war in Iraq were being held Saturday at Camp Pendleton on charges ranging from negligent homicide to dereliction of duty, military officials said.

Meanwhile, a lawyer representing one of the men said the Army did not have the necessary personnel to run the detention camp and the reservists were untrained for the job.

"In the rush to war with Iraq, providing the mandatory training to reservists seems to have had little if any priority with the Pentagon," Donald Rehkopf Jr. said in a statement released Saturday.

Bush Sr.'s 'message' to Bush Jr.

This is pretty surreal, I'll give you that.

It was politically and philosophically obvious. But people around Father Bush, a coterie of traditional internationalist conservatives who protect him like a wolf mother does her cubs, would heatedly deny any family rift -- and nobody spoke publicly about it.

But then you have to wonder why these people let this happen in the first place. It's one thing to have trusted advisers. It's another thing to be a meat puppet for Karl Rove while Rummy, Condi, Cheney, Powell run around the US government behaving like children.

But while family friends say Father Bush has made his disagreements known to his son, they clearly have not found fertile soil in this White House.

More curious, and in many ways depressing, is the fact that this President Bush has embarked upon a policy designed to counter, or even to wipe out, his father's entire political legacy.

The father lived his life in the service of moderate and intelligent internationalism. His manners were always meticulously courteous, as he wooed even critics overseas to see the American position. He was even-handed in the Middle East and thus brought the area to the verge of peace for the first time in history; he was capable of using force but preferred to do it supported by coalitions of friendly states, thus cementing international cooperation.

November 7 will give us a chance to see how this tension, which is crucial to the public and political lives of all Americans, plays out. In the Bush Library announcement of the award to Teddy Kennedy, the spokesman praised the liberal senator as a man who "consistently and courageously fought for his principles," and as an "inspiration to all Americans."

You know what I wish (besides being able to read the president's mind)? I wish Father Bush would drop his polite reticence and tell us what he and the team of his presidency really think about what is happening in America today. I think, as responsible citizens, we deserve that.

As far as I can tell, the rest of the RWAP is still debating the existence proof of the claim of an imminent threat. Or chastising the Left over their civility. Or out there beating the drums of Imperialism. Or defending obscene fiscal policies while helping line the pockets of their cronies. Or telling us how great everything is.

I've even seen more than a few of them take a kick or ten at Kennedy.

Surreal times.

Via Atrios, a link to a review of Al Franken's book by an Oregonian republican.

The Universe is a really, really big place with a lot of complexity. I'm really, really tiny in comparison. My views include the necessity that I'm not always in possession of the truth or even something vaguely resembling the truth when viewed through the bottom of a whiskey glass.

But there's a huge difference between having a different viewpoint from mine to the level of crap that's coming from the right these days.

I believe Franken is telling the truth in his book because it meshes perfectly with what I personally have observed. And I think every decent, honest, hard-working, patriotic, true-blue conservative owes it to himself to read it. Hold your nose if you must -- Franken is as foul-mouthed and crass as his reputation would lead you to believe (and quite mistakenly believes Christians love Israel because it is the center of prophecies that include the fiery deaths of all Jews) -- but read it anyway.

The other day on talk radio, I heard a guy tell an incredulous Lars Larson that he wouldn't believe Rush Limbaugh was a drug addict involved in a drug ring even if Limbaugh himself admitted it. If you're that guy, don't bother reading Franken's book. You will really just drive yourself even more crazy.

The leaders we conservatives have trusted have taken advantage of our trust to line the pockets of the wealthy and powerful, and it's time we rose up and drove out these greedy liars. They've hijacked and distorted our belief system for their own gain, and in doing so are destroying our credibility.

And if we decent, honest, hard-working, patriotic, true-blue conservatives of this country neglect the duty we have to our children and grandchildren, we will never be able to work with those decent, honest, hard-working, patriotic, true-blue liberal Americans that these lying creeps have taught us to despise. We will never be safe to debate them or, when warranted, to listen to them and maybe even agree with them. We will never be safe to work out our differences or to work together. And we will never be able to build on the all-American sense of unity that burst forth following 9/11, only to disappear shortly thereafter in a cloud of lying, greedy partisan politics.

I'm still a decent, honest, hard-working, patriotic, true-blue conservative. But Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity and the rest of you lying liars -- I'm through with you! (Read the book, and you'll get that one, too.)

Becky Miller of Woodburn is former senior aide to Bill Sizemore, president of Oregon Taxpayers United.

I have my own religion, and my gods are fictional. I'm not an atheist. And I know there are a heck of a lot of sane people who's religion is Islam, Christianity, Judaism. But the fact is pretty undeniable that there are sects within this religion composed of people who have simply lost their minds. Powerful people who are not simply some guy down the street who happens to belong to that weird church.

Christians, Muslims, Jews. You all have some really weird things going on. And with the appointment of William "Satan" Boykin to a very important and prominent position within the Administration, I think that the sane Christians are going to have to start dealing with the fact that they have their own wackos in very powerful positions.

I would hope that sane Christians - which are in the vast majority I believe - would start standing up and denouncing these few who are giving your religion a bad name.

After 9/11, we called upon the various leaders in Islam to do the same. We implored them to stand up and denounce these radical elements within their religion.

It'd be real nice if the majority religion in the United States do the same.

And please note I'm not equating moral equivalency here. The radicals of each group are distinctly different. The danger to our democracy, however, is equivalent. The danger to the world is equivalent.

I really don't think the world needs another religious jihad. Dealing with the current one is trouble enough.

Atheists and people like me from minor, obscure religions are not able to deal with this. Christians, themselves, will have to deal with it.

All we can do is point a finger at the moon.

Brad DeLong points to a very cool article he pulled off the WayBack Machine by Clay Shirky entitled In Praise of Evolvable Systems.

When the web came around, I remember being stunned that something so simple and - well - primitive took off like wildfire. At the time I was dealing with Xanadu and the concept of Tumblers for pointers - basically spans for dealing with pointers into tree based, versioned systems.

What blew me away was that something so simple as the URL worked - and worked well. Nothing fancy smancy.

<sigh> Extremely humbling to think about.

Anways, give the article a read - even if you're not a computer geek.

And the Web is just a dress rehearsal. In the next five years, three enormous media -- telephone, television and movies -- are migrating to digital formats: Voice Over IP, High-Definition TV and Digital Video Disc, respectively. As with the Internet of the early '90s, there is little coordination between these efforts, and a great deal of effort on the part of some of the companies involved to intentionally build in incompatibilities to maintain a cartel-like ability to avoid competition, such as DVD's mutually incompatible standards for different continents.

And, like the early '90s, there isn't going to be any strong meta-protocol that pushes Voice Over IP, HDTV and DVD together. Instead, there will almost certainly be some weak 'glue' or 'scaffold' protocol, perhaps SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) or another XML variant, to allow anyone to put multimedia elements together and synch them up without asking anyone else's permission. Think of a Web page with South Park in one window and a chat session in another, or The Horse Whisperer running on top with a simultaneous translation into Serbo-Croatian underneath, or clickable pictures of merchandise integrated with a salesperson using a Voice Over IP connection, ready to offer explanations or take orders.

In those cases, the creator of such a page hasn't really done anything 'new', as all the contents of those pages exist as separate protocols. As with the early Web, the 'glue' protocol subsumes the other protocols and produces a kind of weak integration, but weak integration is better than no integration at all, and it is far easier to move from weak integration to strong integration than from none to some. In 5 years, DVD, HDTV, voice-over-IP, and Java will all be able to interoperate because of some new set of protocols which, like HTTP and HTML, is going to be weak, relatively unco-ordinated, imperfectly implemented and, in the end, invincible.

Thanks to P6 I've been reminded to put up a reminder that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

This is no laughing matter. This is serious stuff. Do the right thing and give.

October is
National Breast Cancer Awareness Month

US explores its Afghanistan exit options

With Afghanistan daily slipping into more anarchy and chaos, United States authorities, aware that they are unlikely to ever bring stability to the country by military means, continue to explore political avenues that ultimately could pave the way for them to withdraw from the country.

First there were the talks at the Pakistan Air Force base in Quetta with "moderate" elements of the Taliban (which immediately failed due to the US insistence on the sidelining of Taliban leader Mullah Omar). Then came the formation of Jaishul Muslim, a formal grouping of lesser Taliban lights (which failed even to enter into Afghanistan), and moves to pry some of the more powerful mujahideen commanders from the anti-US resistance movement.

And last week, former Taliban foreign minister Mullah Abdul Wakeel Mutawakil was released from US custody in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, where he had been in detention since handing himself over to the US in February last year.

Mutawakil has often been described in the Western media as a more "respectable" face of the Taliban. Shortly before the US sent troops to Afghanistan in late 2001, he reportedly had a major disagreement with Mullah Omar over sheltering Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. It was reported that Mutawakil led a group of Taliban who wanted bin Laden to leave Afghanistan to avoid US reprisals against the regime for sheltering al-Qaeda. Before becoming the Taliban foreign minister, Mutawakil is believed to have served as a spokesman and personal secretary to Mullah Omar.

The US has been forced to pursue different tactics in Afghanistan as a result of the failure of their hand-picked man, interim Afghan leader Hamid Karzai, to significantly establish his writ (ie, the US writ) over the country, let alone the capital, Kabul. Similarly, the carefully chosen (ie, compliant) governors in the southern provinces have proved incapable of stamping their authority in their regions, which have now become hotbeds of resistance.

The real power pillars of the Kabul regime, including the Northern Alliance and General Abdul Rasheed Dostum, have now clearly marked the boundaries of their interests, and they are at complete odds with those of the US. Pakistan, too, has shown leanings toward those who are not favored by the US right now.

Foreign Policy Experts Target U.S. 'Empire-Building'

Representatives of a new coalition of prominent foreign-policy scholars and analysts whose political views range from right to center-left announced here Thursday they hope to spearhead opposition to the imperial policies pursued by the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush.

Leaders of the "Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy" charged that the administration is moving ''in a dangerous direction toward empire,'' an idea that they said has never been embraced by the U.S. public.

. . .

''We are a diverse group of scholars and analysts from across the political spectrum who believe that the move toward empire must be Azaelted immediately,'' says the coalition's charter statement, signed by 44 foreign-policy specialists.

''We are united by our desire to turn American national security policy toward realistic and sustainable measures for protecting U.S. vital interests in a manner that is consistent with American values,'' it added.

''The time for debate is now,'' the charter states, noting that imperial policies ''can quickly gain momentum, with new interventions begetting new dangers.''

Among the more prominent right-wing signers are Doug Bandow, a special assistant to former president Ronald Reagan and now a senior officer at the libertarian Cato Institute; Scott McConnell, chief editor of 'The American Conservative' magazine; and Alan Tonelson of the U.S. Business & Industrial Council Educational Foundation.

Representing more centrist positions are Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, former senator Gary Hart, and Harvard international relations professor Stephen Walt.

On the left side of the spectrum are Charles Kupchan, an aide to former president Bill Clinton now with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Kenneth Sharpe, a prominent foreign-policy analyst from Swarthmore College in Philadelphia.

General's 'Satan' remarks freedom of speech: Rumsfeld

Oh, I get it! It's okay to say things that stoke the wild fires of a Christian Crusade against the Muslims. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, all those who are part of the right wing Christian base of the republican party are free to add significant contributions to this idiocy. It's okay to say that the State Department should be nuked to "shake things up", as long as you control a large part of this essential base of republican support.

But the people on the left... well, we're just uncivil. We need to be taken out to the wood shed and taught a little respect.

Abused nun calls torture 'plague of 21st century'

Ah, yes. Guatelmalla. That wonderful country that the US trained, advised, equipped, and yes even helped topple a democratically elected government.

Breaking down at times during a very emotional speech, 43-year-old Ortiz spoke of the aftermath of the abduction, torture and rape that she endured for two days in a Guatemalan clandestine prison in November 1989. Held by one of her machete-wielding torturers, Ortiz said she was forced to stab another tortured woman lying under a blood-stained sheet, whose breasts had been cut.

Ortiz said one captor, who spoke English with a marked American accent, drove her off in his vehicle. She escaped as the car was going through Guatemala City. Ortiz became pregnant as a result of the rape and later ended the pregnancy. On Thursday she stood before a group of 200 people at Loyola's downtown campus and confessed that she was still haunted by the ghosts of torture, including the woman she was forced to harm.

Through that experience, she wants to "pay special attention to the women who have suffered a fate similar to mine, women impregnated with the seed of their torturers,'' said Ortiz, turning away from the audience to sob.

"You must know there are many women of faith who, like myself, carry feelings of shame and constant fear of condemnation, of being told we are unworthy of being part of the faith community and sharing the Eucharist," she continued.

Just to let you know how I feel.

Amnesty: Iraqis Complain of Torture by U.S. Forces

AFGHANISTAN: US official: torture is `just and necessary'

US turns to torture to crack prisoners of war

America's dirty torture secret

Report: Zaeef Tortured to Death in Guantanamo

Moral clarity, indeed.

A couple of people have written me about my comment here about the guerrilla war being completely predictable. Most of the emails are pretty nasty, standard partisan Zombie Mind Tricks^tm about the "Known unknowns, unknown knowns and unknowable unknowns" that are inevitable in warfare.

Well, Crystallyn found a rather fantastic quote that comes from non other than Bush's father, George H.W. Bush in his book A World Transformed (Alfred A.
Knopf, NY, 1998): on page 489:

Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep" and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Further more, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome.

-- George H.W. Bush in A World Transformed

Really guys. Get with the program. If you're going to make such blatant, idiotic, transparently obvious lies about the past, at least make them resistant to even a trivial web search.

Morons.

The Next Phase of the War.

The United States is now trying to accept the guerrilla war as a semi-permanent feature of its occupation of Iraq. It is trying to restart its strategic engines in spite of that reality. From a strictly military point of view, there is no reason why this can't happen. From a strategic point of view, it is a logical necessity. From a domestic point of view, the administration must demonstrate that Iraq was a means toward an end and not an end in itself. It must return to the strategic principles that drove the invasion.

Many things can go wrong with this strategy -- and they might. All strategies are vulnerable to reality, expected and unexpected. The Syrians might not buckle and the United States might not have the ability to coerce them. The Iranians might trigger a massive rising among the Shiites that the United States cannot control. The guerrillas might increase their operations and become strategically significant. And most important, something totally unexpected might happen.

The United States decided to climb aboard the tiger when it invaded Iraq. That is not a bad strategy; the problem is there is no safe way to climb off the tiger. For six months, the U.S. response to the unexpected guerrilla war was to hang onto the tiger and hope he would fall asleep. Hasn't happened. Won't happen. Being on the tiger's back leaves the United States only one option: Ride the tiger.

It is interesting to note the paradox in Rumsfeld. Having been perceived as an enormously aggressively strategist, he turned out to be remarkably passive in the face of unexpected countermoves. This has happened to many strategic planners: Effective in planning a war, they become ineffective in dealing with the unplanned and unexpected. The most dangerous point in a war comes when the unexpected happens and the old plan must be thrown away and a new one devised on the fly. That's what happened in Iraq. The cAzaellenge facing the United States is defining a plan to deal with the unexpected and unwelcomed. If the United States succeeds in doing so -- and in a long war, it will have to do this over and over again -- it can succeed. If the United States behaves as France did in 1940 -- paralyzed by an opponent behaving unexpected -- the outcome can be grim.

Geesh.

It is unclear whether the United States will succeed. The issue is not to deal with the guerrillas in Iraq, but to redefine the entire strategy of the war against al Qaeda -- to revive the link between the Iraq campaign and the effort to destroy the primary adversary. It appears to us that the United States now has begun to do that. However, it is unclear whether it will succeed. The first crisis of the war that began Sept. 11 is being addressed, but it is unclear whether it will be solved.

It will dramatically increase the probability of seeing their collective heads pop, though.

Now, is that a plot line or what?

_____________
*Right Wing of American Punditry

Dean Esmay is addicted to this. He says there must be something wrong with him. I say it's just his good calvinist upbringing that's saying that.

We're all voyeurs.

But then again.

There are a few things that I'm glad I never, ever know.

I don't know if you have already seen this yet. I haven't checked to see if someone has already commented on it.

But I just couldn't resist

Some might argue that you need to have your brain on drugs to say the things Rush said. But I'd argue the opposite. In fact, it might be true that Rush was a better broadcaster because he was high. His particular blend of self-mocking, lacerating, funny and fluent commentary reminds me in a way of people on a kind of high. Or maybe this attitude is actually hard to sustain for so long at such a pitch - and so the drugs helped him endure the slog of daily broadcasting the way drugs can enhance athletes' performance. Either way, the drugs may well have helped him do his job well.

Bush, 'Confident About Our Future,' Departs for Asia taking our jobs along with him.

Grab your barf bag. Raw, unmitigated squealing from the Right.

House Republicans Gleeful Over Discriminatory New Texas Redistricting Map

The following email was sent by Joby Fortson, a staffer in the office of Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) to various Republican staffers in the House of Representatives.

In the email, Fortson goes over the new Texas re-redistricting map district by district. He describes how Republicans packed minorities into congressional districts to dilute their voting power and push Democrats out of office.

Note: This email has not been edited from the original.

Guess this explains those 500 prefabricated letters, don't it?

U.S. Checking for Low Morale Among Troops

The Pentagon (news - web sites) is closely watching for morale problems among troops in Iraq, its two top leaders said Thursday, as a new survey found Azaelf those questioned there are inclined not to re-enlist when their tours of duty end.

The military newspaper Stars and Strips said a third of some 2,000 people questioned said their morale is low. Though the paper said the questionnaire was not scientific, the results raised anew worries that long deployments and the complex and dangerous mission in Iraq will prompt some to leave the military at the first opportunity.

The findings also appeared to contradict previous statements by Bush administration officials and returning congressional delegations, which have portrayed morale as high among occupation forces trying to stabilize violent resistance from remnants of Saddam Hussein's fallen regime as well as restart the economy and government.

Top Defense Department officials didn't dispute the questionnaire results at a Pentagon news conference Thursday, and rather stressed the importance of the issue to them.

Study: S. America Glaciers Melting Faster

Melting of glaciers in the Patagonian ice fields of southern Argentina and Chile has doubled in recent years, caused by higher temperatures, lower snowfall and a more rapid breaking of icebergs, a study suggests.

Using satellites from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Defense Department, researchers measured the loss from two ice fields on the southern tip of South America and found that the rate of melting doubled from 1995 to 2000 when compared with earlier measurements.

Climate change and US agriculture: Benefits dwindle as the picture sharpens

For the Southeast, the fine-scale model for 2060 shows a loss of 33% of the region's agricultural economic base without adaptation and 20% percent even with adaptation. This occurs in spite of cotton production that could soar well above current levels as the climate warms. "Aside from cotton production, one might expect to see agriculture diminish as an economic force in the Southeast," says Mearns.

One factor making the fine-scale analysis more pessimistic is that it includes many topographic features omitted from the coarser model, such as parts of the Appalachians and details of the Gulf and Atlantic coastlines. When these features are included, the model focuses its more stressful climatic changes on agriculturally productive areas. The result is a less rosy picture for U.S. croplands overall.

According to Mearns, the study confirms that "the scale of scenario matters, both in terms of changes in crop yields and in final national and regional economic results."

The Pentagon Unleashes a Holy Warrior

All Americans, including those in uniform, are entitled to their views. But when Boykin publicly spews this intolerant message while wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army, he strongly suggests that this is an official and sanctioned view — and that the U.S. Army is indeed a Christian army.

But that's only part of the problem. Boykin is also in a senior Pentagon policymaking position, and it's a serious mistake to allow a man who believes in a Christian "jihad" to hold such a job.

For one thing, Boykin has made it clear that he takes his orders not from his Army superiors but from God — which is a worrisome line of command. For another, it is both imprudent and dangerous to have a senior officer guiding the war on terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan who believes that Islam is an idolatrous, sacrilegious religion against which we are waging a holy war.

And judging by his words, that is what he believes.

‘Tugboat’ could push away asteroids

In the grand cosmic scheme of things, it’s only a matter of time. Our planet is bound to tangle with an Earth-crossing asteroid, an event sure to make a mess. Some of these space rocks could demolish a city. Other monster boulders, the really big bruisers, could snuff out our civilization. But why be at the mercy of a menacing asteroid that has Earth in its cross hairs? Now an expert team of astronauts and space scientists has blueprinted a safety strategy for Earth: an asteroid tugboat.

From Stratfor.

A more plausible patron might be Iran. Israel recently leaked information to the press of plans for preemptive strikes to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities. Tehran's nuclear capabilities have been a key point in the U.S. argument against the Islamic republic. The implied threat would be perceived by Iran as one that requires a response.

An attack on U.S. nationals in Gaza could be Iran's way of demonstrating to Washington its regional reach and its ability to cause Americans pain and suffering. Iran has supported Hamas, and in the past allegedly has provided financing, arms and other types of aid to the militant group.

Tehran doesn't want a confrontation with Washington, but neither can it sit by while the United States and Israel threaten it. Reminding the United States that it can also be a target is a message Tehran would want to send -- albeit indirectly.

The perpetrators of the convoy bombing have not fundamentally changed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But they have set a precedent for expanding the potential targets to include U.S. nationals, who previously were considered off-limits despite Washington's close alliance with Israel. Now that this taboo has been broken, we must ask: Will other groups copy the model?

Okay, so the second response is up in the great debate o' rama. The first part is a general fisking exercise with special pleading regarding the Thesaurus defense. The meat of the argument is way at the end.

The problem at this point is that you equate all arguments that Saddam was a threat as if they were arguments that Saddam was an imminent threat. Of course Bush argued that Saddam was a threat. But he never fell into the trap which Kennedy and Byrd tried to set when they wanted an authorization predicated on an 'imminent threat'. Bush and his administration argued that Saddam was threat that would get worse over time. They argued that he was a threat that could not be deterred forever. But they did not argue that he had something in mind to attack us right now, they did not argue he was an imminent threat.

Which is, to coin a phrase, complete Bollocks.

It's pretty clear that the Bush administration went out of their way to make everyone believe it was an imminent threat - not necessarily an immediate threat. The phrase "We don't want a smoking gun to turn into a mushroom cloud" is pretty clearly implying an imminent threat. Likewise all the talk about Saddam getting nuclear weapons in six months. Then there's the Unmanned Aerial Drones that could be smuggled into our country with suit cases to disperse chemical or biological weapons...

Holsclaw's argument is that simply because the Administration labeled Saddam a threat doesn't mean that they were saying he was an imminent threat. Which, of course, begs the question as to why we had to have a war ASAP, without the backing of the international community? Why did we have to vote on the war resolution BEFORE the 2002 mid term elections?

If Saddam was simply a threat, but not an imminent threat, why then the rush?

At issue is whether the characterization by the Bush administration portrayed Saddam as an imminent threat. Not whether they actually said the words "imminent threat". And it's pretty clear from the record, that the Administration pushed this whole affair as something that needed to be taken care of immediately - imminently.

Taking someone out before they can actually hit you is a wise strategy. And if someone is just sitting on a bench 20 yards away thinking about hitting you with their fists, then it's not an imminent threat. This is what Holsclaw seems to be arguing. We took out this guy because he *could* become an imminent threat, and by then it would be too late. We don't know if he has a gun, after all.

Which then goes to the question of whether "imminent" is transitive. The way Holsclaw is framing the question, imminent means within seconds - i.e. the bombs are already on their way. To the rest of the world, however, imminent means capable and ready to strike - preparing to strike. But the strike hasn't happened yet.

In Holsclaw's world, a threat isn't imminent until the bullet leaves the barrel of the gun. A man holding the gun with his finger on the trigger, pointing the barrel at your chest is not an imminent threat. A member of the Mob coming up to you and saying "We have an offer you can't refuse" isn't an imminent threat. Finding a horse head beside you in your bed when you wake up in the morning isn't an imminent threat.

Nope. It's only when the bullet is about to blow your heart apart that it becomes imminent.

Funny world these people live in. Really glad this kind of intellect is driving US politics and foreign policy.

Not.

Pope loses approval; 50% say he should step down

andrew sullivan toady

Hellblazer is proud to be the number one Google listing for this search phrase.

Schwarzenegger Asked To Explain Ken Lay Meeting

California governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger must explain the substance of his private May 2001 meeting with Enron chief Ken Lay, the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights wrote in a letter to Schwarzenegger Tuesday.

FTCR, which was the state's most vocal critic of Governor Gray Davis' handling of the energy crisis, said that if the governor-elect did not recount the meeting by the time of his inauguration, the group would ask state lawmakers to open an investigation to uncover the substance of the meeting, including any information that might further the state's efforts to return billions of dollars that taxpayers and consumers overpaid for electricity during the energy crisis.

"A meeting with the biggest corporate crook in recent memory, while he and his firm were in the midst of ripping off the state, should not be taken lightly," FTCR wrote. "As Governor, you must explain to Californians what you were doing at that meeting, what information Ken Lay shared with you and how the meeting has influenced your thinking on energy issues."

Martial arts robots hit Asian tech fair

Humanoid robots capable of performing somersaults and complex martial arts moves were demonstrated at Asia's largest electronics and computing fair in Tokyo on Saturday.

Visitors to CEATEC 2003 (Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies) met Morph3, a human-like robot about 30-centimetres tall developed by researchers at the Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan. It can perform back flips and karate moves thanks to 138 pressure sensors, 30 different onboard motors and 14 computer processors.

Despite changes, U.S. resolution faces resistance

Boucher indicated that the Bush administration would be satisfied if the resolution gets nine votes, the bare minimum required for passage. "We'll certainly look for the broadest possible support ... but we're also looking to get a resolution," he said.

Histologian has a rather interesting post following up on the issue of Turkey sending 10,000 troops into Iraq. In particular, a discussion of the severity of the internal difficulties that Turkey faces in this action.

All this however doesn't mean that the worse case scenario of "deep" Turkish involvement won't come to pass. Just that the possible side effects might be too terrible to even contemplate... and, frankly. I live too close to the area, to view all this as a strategic exercise.

But everyone gets worn down eventually. 8.5 Billion dollars is really hard to pass up for a developing country - especially by the greedy politicians, forget the honest souls who want to spend it wisely. Add to this the enormous pressure to please the US, who is a strategic proponent of Turkey's entry into the EU (as well as the UK) and it would seem that a deal with the devil is inevitable. They're in a vise that is producing unbearable pressure. They're bound to pop.

Again, I don't particularly hold that against them. Again, I think they've been doing a fantastic job as a developing country struggling to adhere to their own constitution and their own internal politics on the matter.

But everyone has a breaking point, and the US/UK have an enormous amount of leverage here.

I think Turkey falling into the pit is inevitable. And yes, that is too terrible to contemplate.

Or should I say there is a grave and gathering danger of jumping the shark?

Well, Drezner has a debate up as to whether the administration did or did not say Iraq was an imminent threat (first argument here). Daniel (not Drezner), over at the Crooked Timber has a rather entertaining post on whether "imminent" is transitive. Ted, also of CT, pointed me to a rather long post which literally bitch slaps the idea that the Administration made no such claims as to Iraq being an imminent threat. You should definitely read it. It's very good.

In any case, the Thesaurus definition is evidence of the whole irony of the situation. While the White House attempts to redefine what exactly is an "imminent threat", they use a word that is actually the synonym for "imminent."

I should note that the redefinition is of the term of art "imminent threat." The irony only functions in the reductive and literalistic sense of making comparisons amongst things like Thesaurus entries. Of course, the literalistic sense is the one that is adhered to when the righties try to argue that the White House never used the words "imminent threat." If one looks at the meaning of "imminent threat," one can see numerous examples of the White House conveying that meaning. If one looks literalistically at the use of "imminent threat," then the White House has been much more defensible.

Basically, it's just another example of how pathetic this whole Iraq "affair" is. Any respect I had left for those on the Right who still support the war has been completely and utterly removed now that they are reduced to defending their position with a Thesaurus.

Careful!!! Don't come any closer! I have a thesaurus and I know how to use it! I can dress you down five ways to Sunday in iambic pentameter if I have to!

What a bunch of absolute loons.

Alex Tabarrok pointed me to his post on the subject of the Chilean voucher experiment and has a lot of interesting things to say. He also points to another on the same subject which is very interesting, Vouchers for Private Schooling in Colombia.

I'm going to have to take a look at this and think about the issues he brings up. Definitely worth the read. Thanks Alex.

From Stratfor.

The reason for Iran's decision relates to the United States having raised the specter of Israel's nuclear weapons. Iran knows of the threat, but publicly brandishing it put Iran in a position where it simply had to respond. Since it didn't have a nuclear arsenal to brandish, it chose to flex its muscles in a more immediate way, threatening the stability of Iraq's Shiite area. If this theory is true, Iran was reminding the United States that what stability Iraq enjoys has more to do with quiet in the Shiite areas than with U.S. power. This gave a taste of instability, designed to remind the United States of the dangers it faces.

Israel's invocation of the Libyan nuclear threat is more surprising, since Libya has not been on most lists as a nuclear threat. In fact, since the U.S.-Libya agreement on the Lockerbie compensation, Libya seemed to be in the axis of the not-so-terrible. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's statement through an aide that "Libya is diligently attempting to acquire nuclear know-how with help and support from North Korea and Pakistan. Not help as in buying a bomb but help in acquiring technology and know-how to build a bomb" came as quite a surprise.

With all the issues on Israel's plate, it is hard to imagine that it is choosing this moment to cook up a crisis with Libya. Obviously, the U.S. statement on Israel's nuclear weapons cued the Libyan statement, but Israel wants the United States focused on Iran and Syria. The last thing it wants is a U.S. diversion to an adversary that is noncritical to Israel's interests.

This leads us to conclude that Israel has actual intelligence indicating that Libya is acquiring nuclear technology. Sharon's statement regarding Libya as the main nuclear threat was not made casually. On the other hand, the claim is pretty startling. This is not a crisis we were expecting.

One explanation might be that this is a way to focus on Pakistan -- one of the countries, along with North Korea, that Israel named as the source for the technology. Israel might be asking the United States to shut down Pakistan's nuclear capability to stop Libya. But, by including North Korea, Israel is pressing the United States to commit forces where Israel has no interest. Leading us to conclude, again, that Israel might actually believe that the Libyan threat is real. North Africa has been fairly quiet until now. This changes things a lot.

Congratulations!

Now, about getting a ride off this rock. . .

In the course of a conversation with a friend of mine about the Chilean voucher experiment it became clear that the issue really boiled down to the following point:

The main effect of vouchers in Chile has been to facilitate sorting.

And then, naturally, the argument begins about whether sorting students is a good idea or not.

So you can cancel the previous analysis request. Thanks for all the thoughts, though.

A thought just occurred to me. Might be obvious to everyone else... But, all the talk is around arguing about the 87 Billion dollar budget. We hear a lot about how "over budget" the request is. $33,000 a piece for a truck. As opposed to $14K which we spend here state side for the same truck. Things like that.

So, here's the strategy. Say that you wanted to funnel a lot of money into so called "black projects". I don't know. Missile defense. New nuclear weapons. Space based weaponry. Seems to me that an ideal way to get the funding for these projects would be to pad the bills of the Iraq reconstruction.

If you're caught, you can blame it on the over charging that your Azaelliburton buddies are doing - if you don't get too greedy.

So you distract the lefties into fighting about cronyism with Azaelliburton and Bechtel. You count on the "support for the troops" as a given. Eventually, the US populace will swallow. Sugar coating and flag waving by the media are required to make it easier to keep down. Any money they do cut comes out of your crony's pocket - gives them incentive to spend the bucks lobbying for your bill.

And now we have projects that Congress never approved being funded by significant dollars with zero oversight.

Wasn't too long ago I heard about the Administration wanting to move the Anti Ballistic Missile research out from Congressional oversight.

Hmmm. Now I can see what that implies.

Been wondering how they were going to fund all this new military technology they were drooling to develop. The Iraqi reconstruction boondoggle is as good of a funding vehicle as any.

I should have known.

It's for the children.

Found this via Talking Points Memo, naturally.

Anyways, just listen to it. My jaw is just on the floor.

Five minute segment on one of the American businessmen, Tompie Azaell, trying to get a piece of the Iraqi reconstruction action.

I've been arguing with a friend about the implications of the paper pointed out by Brad DeLong two days ago, regarding the study of the School Voucher Program in Chile. It's an amazing study, 20 years worth of data on probably the best experiment to date on the effectiveness of school vouchers.

The paper itself is $5 to download. I have a copy I can lend you if this is too much of a burden. I think $5 is a reasonable price for the paper, so I'm not going to publish the link to my copy.

However, I am asking for some help on this. Here's the summary of the paper.

When Schools Compete, How Do They Compete? An Assessment of Chile's Nationwide School Voucher Program: In 1981, Chile introduced nationwide school choice by providing vouchers to any student wishing to attend private school. As a result, more than 1,000 private schools entered the market, and the private enrollment rate increased by 20 percentage points, with greater impacts in larger, more urban, and wealthier communities. We use this differential impact to measure the effects of unrestricted choice on educational outcomes. Using panel data for about 150 municipalities, we find no evidence that choice improved average educational outcomes as measured by test scores, repetition rates, and years of schooling. However, we find evidence that the voucher program led to increased sorting, as the best public school students left for the private sector.

Also, and perhaps more interesting, is that I'm looking for some research regarding the effects of stratification that Hsie and Urquiola found in the Chilean voucher experiment. Here's a snippet of the conversation I'm having with my friend.

Is it the case that you feel that it's worse for society that we have a schools like Harvard and Ohio State, instead of just having one uniform sort of university? I realize that you don't suggest that vouchers and elite private universities are related questions, but I'm just curious. It appears that your objection to vouchers is that you feel that the removal of the best students from public schools, if indeed that's happening (and it's reasonable to suppose, although it's not proven by this paper, as the authors clearly state), is bad. So is it bad because you assume that this makes school less effective for the students that don't leave? What if these kids were all in normal track classes and the students that left were all in advanced track classes? If it didn't change their environment in any way? Is the objection that there is some sort of stratification of ability? Or is it that the stratification seems to happen on the basis of income? What I saw in the report said that it was ability, and the correlation with income was the known and apparently consistent property that parents that make more money (up to a point) usually regard push education more and can more effectively help their kids.

I really don't know the answers myself and what I guess I'm really asking is for some of you who actually know what you're talking about (as opposed to me) weigh in on the implications of this paper.

You can contact me via email (upper left corner of the front page, under "Contact"), or leave comments in this post.

And many thanks in advance for comments from all sectors of political ideology.

A rather interesting follow up to their third quarter forecast. From Stratfor.

Last week saw an interesting evolution in the U.S.-Islamist war, an evolution that revealed itself over the past 48 hours. The initial purpose of the Iraq campaign was to position the United States to bring pressure on the countries surrounding Iraq -- particularly Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the campaign, terrific pressure was brought on all three countries. The unexpected emergence of a guerrilla campaign in Iraq seemed to constrain the United States in projecting its power. As the reality of the guerrilla campaign set in, the United States focused inside Iraq, creating a situation in which the war in Iraq had no end beyond Iraq.

U.S. pressure was not without consequence. Saudi Arabia, in particular, moved to comply with U.S. wishes concerning the destruction of al Qaeda inside the kingdom. Iran proved willing to accommodate the United States, albeit at a price. However, Syria appeared to read the situation in Iraq as a quagmire that limited any threat from the United States. After initially seeming to move toward an accommodation with the United States, Syria shifted its policy by last summer, clearly calculating that the United States would be in no position to threaten Syria while the Iraqi campaign festered.

There is little question but that U.S. momentum in the war declined as the guerrilla war set in. However, it appears to us that, over the past week or so, the United States has moved toward regaining momentum and is reasserting pressure, particularly toward Syria, and to a lesser extent, Iran. Indeed, Syria currently finds itself locked in a massive crisis that it did not expect. Reports say that Syria is mobilizing its military, but -- mobilized or not -- it has few military options. It has been trapped by the sudden reversal of U.S. energy.

U.S.: Iraqi Reconstruction Oversight Agency Announced

United States Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for International Technology Security John Shaw announced the creation of a new U.S. agency to oversee the distribution of contracts to rebuild Iraq, AFP reported Oct. 13. The agency has yet to be named, but retired admiral David Nash has been slated to administer it. The agency will be responsible for the coordination of sub-contracting work in Iraq, notably by U.S. companies Bechtel and Azaelliburton -- the main Iraqi reconstruction contractors.

I kid! I kid!

This kind of thing can only be good news for Iraqi people and the US occupation efforts.

I want to take up a collection and buy every person in the punditry a copy of Sim City. I think it would do them a world of good trying to figure out how to implement their policy ideals in this entertaining simulation. It just brings a tear to my eye when people realize that capitalism dies without taxes. People get stupid, don't live healthy enough, services fail and the money just moves out of town. Likewise, businesses die when taxed too much. No one has any work, and everyone leaves for greener pastures.

If nothing else, seeing them throw up their arms in frustration and start spouting about the treasonous, communistic simulation writers that are foiling their ideologically based fiscal policy decisions is well worth the price.

<giggle>

Besides, now ins Sim City 4, you can import your Sims and actually get to experience a slice o' life in the hell on earth you've created. (of course, there was Sim Hell (Afterlife) for that fantasy role playing.

Now if we can get the Sim Occupation game out for all the arm chair Bremers like me. . .

Bush insists he's 'in charge' of Iraq policy

And don't you love the quoting of 'in charge'? <giggle>

''The person who is in charge is me,'' Bush told Tribune Broadcasting when asked about the infighting and who was in charge.

Bush said his administration had a strategy and it was being carried out by the U.S. civil administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, whose nickname is Jerry.

''In all due respect to politicians here in Washington, D.C., who make comments, they're just wrong about our strategy. We've had a strategy from the beginning, Jerry Bremer is running the strategy and we are making very good progress about the establishment of a free Iraq,'' Bush said.

''A good peace after World War II meant that Germany and Japan were friends, and the world was better off for it, and so was America. I view this as an historic parallel,'' Bush told Belo Broadcasting.

''If the people don't think I'm doing my job, they'll find somebody they think ... can, that's my attitude,'' Bush said. ''Look, I just don't make decisions on polls and I can't worry about polls.''

Pretty soon now.

‘No OIC Peacekeepers for Iraq’

Hoo boy.

The idea of putting together a Muslim peacekeeping force to stabilize Iraq met with a cool reception at an Islamic summit here yesterday.

Hoshyar Zebari, foreign minister of the US-picked Iraqi Governing Council, told reporters it would welcome contributions from countries attending a summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Malaysia that would help stabilize Iraq.

“But the indications we are getting here so far are not that encouraging. I don’t think there is any desire by the Muslim countries to send troops,” he said.

Most Muslim countries have rejected the idea of sending peacekeepers to Iraq without at least a UN stamp of approval.

“The sentiment of this meeting is that stability should come as soon as possible in Iraq,” Musa Braiza, a Jordanian representative, said. The countries “will do anything possible and everything positive. But the question of forces is now not on the agenda.”

Hoshyar Zebari, foreign minister of the US-picked Iraqi Governing Council, told reporters it would welcome contributions from countries attending a summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Malaysia that would help stabilize Iraq.

“But the indications we are getting here so far are not that encouraging. I don’t think there is any desire by the Muslim countries to send troops,” he said.

Most Muslim countries have rejected the idea of sending peacekeepers to Iraq without at least a UN stamp of approval.

“The sentiment of this meeting is that stability should come as soon as possible in Iraq,” Musa Braiza, a Jordanian representative, said. The countries “will do anything possible and everything positive. But the question of forces is now not on the agenda.”

Dave has been doing yeoman's work on this issue all along, but his latest post is really quite good. My favorite bit is this

Facts are to spin like garlic to vampires: effective, but only in well-coordinated bunches. Anyone interested in seeing justice done in the Plame matter -- which is to say, anyone interested in the integrity of national security and the rule of law -- will have to counter the spin of Bush apologists with some talking points of their own.

Lot's of justified noise regarding the many identical letters that soldiers are sending from Iraq to their home town papers. Astroturfing, as it's called.

But I think this is just an obvious part of the Administration's strategy at an end run around the major news media by injecting their message right into the local news media outlets. It's just part of the same campaign.

Geesh.

Why isn't anyone connecting the dots? Heck, the dots are already connected.

Monkey mind moves robotic arm

U.S. researchers say they have taught monkeys to play computer games using only their thoughts.

In an experiment at Duke University Medical Center in South Carolina, two monkeys learned to use a joystick, which was connected to a robotic arm, to move a cursor on a computer screen.

The robotic arm was kept in a separate room to avoid distraction. The animals could watch a monitor to see when they missed their target.

The researchers later switched off the robotic arm, but their subjects continued to manipulate the joystick.

In time, one of the monkeys realized it didn't have to move its own arm to continue the game, because now the robotic arm was being controlled directly by signals coming from brain implants.

The other animal also stopped using the joystick.

I don't always agree with him, but damn, does he make me think.

The fact that the author of this piece, Ophelia Benson, regards this as somehow self-evidently unhinged--rather than simply self-evident--suggests many things: the pernicious influence of Richard Dawkins on the mind's of today's young, the power of thesis-driven research to override the evidence of your senses, and, sadly, a radical refusal to acknowledge the consequences of science being a social enterprise. Those who do so end up unable to differentiate Holocaust deniers from tenders of supercolliders in Benson's world, all for trying to understand the complex history of the word "rational."

Or less evil of two lessers? This is a rather good analysis of the Turkey/Iraq situation from Stratfor. Or rather depressing, depending on your point of view. Perhaps both, if you are of that mind set.

From Stratfor.

Turkish negotiations with Washington over the Iraq deployment will be difficult indeed. Washington has its own vision for Iraq, and an overly strong (from its perspective) Turkish role and full accession to Ankara's demands does not fully fit in. However, the Bush administration is likely to agree to most of Turkey's negotiating points, for several reasons.

For one thing, the time for Washington to decide how to defeat the Iraqi resistance movement is rapidly running out, before U.S. President George W. Bush's re-election chances diminish beyond repair and before the financial costs of operations in Iraq become economically unbearable. Who would be able and willing to make a timely difference on the ground in Iraq? Surely not Honduras. In Stratfor's mind, it appears that only the Turkish army, which is strong in both numbers and training -- as well as familiar with the war theater and local guerrillas' tactics -- is a viable option.

That would require much more than the initial 10,000-strong deployment -- but the Turkish General Staff has a follow-on plan to rapidly expand its military presence in Iraq. The end goal also would require significant and continued human sacrifices, but the tolerance among the Turkish army and public for these are higher than those of Americans.

Another reason Washington is likely to accept most of Ankara's demands is that a Turkish deployment would largely extricate American forces from the war, allowing them to serve the goal they came to Iraq with in the first place: To project force against other countries in the region that are deemed to be potential U.S. foes, such as Syria, Saudi Arabia or Iran.

Moreover, if Washington makes a deal with Ankara quickly, the United States would stand a chance of outmaneuvering its opposition within the U.N. Security Council over Iraq: With a massive deployment of skilled Turkish soldiers on the ground, Washington could simply cancel its draft resolution requesting U.N. authorization for foreign troops. This would keep the Bush administration from having to cede control over Iraq to the United Nations -- though that control would have to be shared with Ankara.

It would seem that in Washington's eyes, this is the lesser evil.

The Least Bad Option

Ah yes. Now we don't have any time for a discussion regarding what to do with Iraq. A year ago, we simply didn't have any time for a discussion about what to do with an Iraq occupation, either. Back then, we simply had no time for a debating society. The administration was simply too busy planning a war to waste any time to answer the repeated requests from our elected representatives to reveal their plan for post war Iraq.

Of course, that was back when everyone knew Iraq was an imminent threat. Well, not really imminent. Pre-imminent. After all, we couldn't wait for the smoking gun to turn out to be a mushroom cloud.

But that's all water under the bridge. We didn't have any choice about the war - given our psychosis. Now, according to one of the biggest cheer leaders of the war, we simply have no choice about the occupation as well. We're simply going to have to suck it up and live with it. All the other choices we have at this point are simply worse.

Well, I'll say it again. The failure here was all due to the inability of the US to follow our own constitution.

Silly, really. Imagine how many lives, how much money, and how much time we could have saved if we just simply followed our own process enshrined by the constitution.

It was a trivially simple test and we failed with flying colors.

Well, well, well. The Plame scandal certainly seems to be heating up. Of course, by now you have read the other fine blog commentary on today's Washington Post article. This whole affair has been a source of constant amusement to me. Quiddity, naturally, has the best running tabulation of the excuses of the Right Wing of American Punditry (RWAP).

And today was another bitch slap to the RWAP. No, the source for the WaPo reporters was not "confused" as to the timing. F U! Of course, the source could be wrong - that's a matter for the courts and law enforcement to decide, after all. But it was a very striking refutation of a lot of psycho babble out there.

The amusing thing is that it is really beginning to look like a scandal - a big one. Of course the cover up is almost always worse than the original crime. But the Plame scandal is looking very much like a despicable act in its own right.

<heh>

Juan hits the nail on the head regarding the reading of the tea leaves on display in Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh.

I think Limbaugh's addiction problems are symptomatic of the far Right. It depends on feeling and spreading hatred, especially for those who are not sufficiently "self", and are too much involved in or like the "Other." Limbaugh's racist comments about an African-American quarterback being "given a pass," his jibes against "femi-Nazis," and other male chauvinist sentiments, and his xenophobia or hatred of foreigners, all characterize him as an American Nationalist if we understand that latently such American Nationalism is coded as "white" and "male." Hating the "Other" is always a sign of an insecurity complex. It is often forgotten that Freud's idea of an insecurity complex did not concern wimpy nerds; it was an explanation for bullying behavior. Limbaugh's insecurity complex drives his addictive personality at the same time it impels him to feel insecure about others who differ from him, racially, gender-wise, or ideologically. Only by gaining a secure and healthy sense of his own self, only by coming to see that he does not need to depend on numbing his insecurities with drugs, could he hope to attain the interior peace and self-confidence that would allow him to embrace and love the French, African-Americans, and lesbians.

Likewise, Robertson's hatred of the State Department derives from his perception that it is dedicated to making compromises with the Other. His deep internal insecurity makes him see such compromises as threatening to the integrity of his own fragile Self. His desire to see a mushroom cloud blossom over Foggy Bottom, a desire which joins him ideologically to al-Qaeda, is a way for him to forestall any temptations he has to compromise with others, since he fears compromise will humiliate him and cause his ego to collapse. Again, the only real cure to this neurosis, which is apparently taking on apocalyptic proportions, would be for him to feel good about himself. This may require that he abandon Calvinist theology, which typically glories in self-denigration, and adopt a more positive, humanist outlook. It is also possible that studying with a well-grounded and mature personality like the Dalai Lama would allow him to forsake his explosive fury toward the pin-striped, which is rooted in self-hatred.

Progressing nicely, no?

Baghdad blast kills at least 10

A powerful car bomb has killed at least 10 people outside a central Baghdad hotel used by U.S. officials, injuring many and filling the air with thick black smoke, police say.

Eyewitnesses said they saw a car crash through the security barrier at the Baghdad Hotel and explode. The hotel is widely thought to be used by members of the CIA, officials of the U.S. -led coalition, their Iraqi partners in the Governing Council as well as U.S. contractors.

A policeman at the scene said at least ten people had been killed. Hotel employees said five or six bodies lay in the hotel courtyard.

At a nearby hospital, a Reuters photographer saw more than a dozen wounded, many seriously. Several were Iraqi policemen.

Very, very cool.

Enter a search term and an RSS feed is generated for it.

This is a rather obvious outcome, from my ignorant POV. In all but the most trivial of systems, there is a transition period that is absolutely required to move from the current, undesirable state to the future, more desirable state.

Free markets can hit economic growth

If developing countries join the global economy too soon, they risk becoming trapped in a cycle of poverty and corruption, a new analysis suggests.

A number of empirical studies have shown that poorer countries experience higher levels of corruption. Badly paid officials are easily tempted by bribes, the reasoning goes, while the well paid officials in richer nations risk losing their comfortable salaries if they are caught taking backhanders. But if corruption so bedevils developing nations, how do they escape and become rich?

Daniele Paserman, an economist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and his colleagues say they have found a simple answer. If a poor country opens up its economy to the outside world too quickly, the flow of money across its borders encourages corruption, which in turn hampers growth.

But those countries with closed economies can grow until they can afford to pay their officials well. This runs counter to the conventional wisdom that free markets across borders encourage development and cut corruption. "We are highlighting one of the dangers of being more open," says Paserman. "But there are other benefits."

Or so Joseph Stiglitz believes.

Blowing the whistle on Dubyanomics

This month the Nobel prize-winning economist returned to Britain as an acidic economic polemicist, with a more direct message about the US economy. There will not be a robust recovery, and the fault can be traced to Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan's actions during the Nineties, and the policy failures of President Bush.

'More jobs have been lost under Bush than since Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression,' he said in an interview. 'In the private sector more money has been wasted through misallocation of capital in the stock-market bubble than the government could ever manage.'

In a week in which US stock markets hit 16-month highs, surely there is some room for optimism? Stiglitz was having none of it. 'The huge tax cut in the US was very badly designed to stimulate the economy. And there has been a huge increase in mainly military spending. Yet what is remarkable is how little stimulus has been given. The US economy is still in a precarious state,' he said.

But surely 'destruction' is a little strong? 'Dealing with the deficit will absorb the US political economy for years to come. We're back to the Reagan era. The trade deficit has the underlying problem of what will happen when foreigners decide to stop funding the US deficit. On the private side there is a huge gap in private pension funds. Any other economy would be under water.'

The scandals over conflicts of interest in accounting and banking were predictable fruits of 'market fundamentalism', he says. 'The image is Adam Smith. The reality is Enron.' But the really bad news is to come, he argues. 'What is likely to happen is more of a languishing malaise, with very weak job recovery. China has joined the WTO and is now the manufacturing engine of the world. Manufacturing is now down to 14 per cent of the economy. Those last few per cent are going to be very painful.'

Report: Mossad, IAF have plan for Iran nuke sites

The German newspaper Der Spiegel reported Saturday that Israel has prepared plans for a pre-emptive strike against Iran's nuclear facilities in order to Azaelt Iran's progress towards attaining nuclear weapons.

Der Spiegel reported that a special unit of the Mossad received an order two months ago to prepare a detailed plan to destroy Iran's nuclear sites. According to the paper, the Mossad's plan is ready and has been delivered to the Israeli Air Force, which will carry out the strike.

The newspaper said its source is an IAF fighter-bomber pilot, who said the plan to take out Iran's nuclear sites was "complex, yet manageable."

The paper added that Israel knows Iran has six nuclear sites, all of which would be attacked simultaneously by Israeli jets.

The paper added that the Mossad believes Iran has reached an advanced stage in its nuclear program and is capable of producing enriched uranium, a vital ingredient of nuclear bombs. The report went on to say that three of Iran's nuclear sites were totally unknown to the outside world.

Aid Workers Leaving Iraq, Fearing They Are Targets

A great majority of foreign aid workers in Iraq, fearing they have become targets of the postwar violence, have quietly pulled out of the country in the past month, leaving essential relief work to their Iraqi colleagues and slowing the reconstruction effort.

Projects that have been abandoned, at least temporarily, because of the exodus include efforts to dig village wells, repair electrical systems and refurbish health clinics and local hospitals — all of which could bring much needed services to hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

The largest reduction in staff has been at the United Nations operation in Iraq, which after two bombings at its main compound since August cut its work force to 35 from a peak of 600 in August.

Nearly every other relief organization has made some reductions, saying that parts of Iraq are now highly risky, between unpredictable spasms of bombing and shooting and high levels of street crime. There have been two killings of aid workers since July, three grenade attacks on aid groups in the last month and at least two carjackings.

What is the only nuclear power in the Middle East?

Israel Can Launch Nuclear Weapons from Subs -Report

According to a story posted on the newspaper's Web site, U.S. officials disclosed the information as a caution to Israel's enemies amid heightened tensions in the region and concern over Iran's atomic program.

The newspaper said two U.S. administration officials described the Israeli modifications and an Israeli official confirmed it. All three asked not to be identified.

According to the U.S. officials, Israel modified nuclear warheads to fit the widely used Harpoon cruise missile. They would be carried on three diesel-powered submarines delivered by a German builder at the end of the last decade.

An Israel Navy Web site said the submarines carry Harpoon missile but does not give details on the warheads.

Deployed by the U.S. Navy (news - web sites) since 1977, the Harpoon is in the arsenal of 28 nations. Israel has 120 Harpoons capable of submarine launch, according to various researchers. That version is 15 feet long and weighs 1,500 pounds with a range of 70 miles or more. It can carry a 488-pound warhead.

I found this article rather interesting from a number of perspectives.

In light of these observations, there is something quite striking. We can act without reasoning. I do not mean that there is no thinking process going on when we do so, that the brain is inactive, only that the "higher" part of it, the (self-?) conscious, rational part (which performs the abstract reasoning?), the "voice" part when we are thinking in a language, is not engaged in the task. The act is being done by some other part of the brain. [1] So what determined my behaviour? Habit, I suppose. Perhaps there is some "put on trousers" pattern of activity which, once activated in my brain, does not need conscious [2] intervention to complete the task. [3] I sAzaell not go into this any further, I believe I have shown all I need. The conclusion is that something other than my conscious self can control my actions - so the second mistake which might be made is to think that anything we want (in the sense of providing motivation or affecting behaviour) we must consciously want, i.e. that each part of the brain is aware of (and agrees with) the other parts.

So a very quick study of behaviour and our internal thoughts suggests very strongly that the brain exists as a number of more-or-less independently functional parts. [4] Once we have accepted this point, the (theoretical, but not practical) "problem" of akrasia is solved: it is no wonder that we do not always do what we consciously believe to be for the best, for it is not only the conscious part of our mind which controls our behaviour. How far does this go? I suggest very far: at many times, the more rational parts of our brain are little more than spectators of our behaviour... and we should not assume that our rational mind can override the irrational parts even if they would try to [5]. In fact, the reverse is probably more common. When reasons are considered and evaluated, the resulting (rational) decision may (if unliked) be overridden by an irrational part of the brain. The resulting conflict ("cognitive dissonance") has been shown to often result in a change in the perceived reasonability of the action. [6]

But there is a massive flip side to this, unreasoning actions - not random nor unpurposeful - just not reasoned. Bureaucracy is - universally understood at least - to be largely unreasoned action. There are scads and scads of other examples of unreasoned action as well.

And so I think it's extremely important to keep in mind that we - as a nation, political organization, or regional binding - can both want and not want the same thing. And it is extremely unclear whether the "reasoning" part of our collective action can override and modify the unreasoning part of the group behavior.

And quite frankly, I think this is a rather good model of what's been happening in the world today - the US and the UK in particular.

From Stratfor.

The most notable similarity among the new coordinators of Washington's revamped Iraq policies is that, no matter how intellectually adept, they are (for the most part) political lightweights. The new Iraq Stabilization Group is, in effect, headed by a team of minor technicians -- with the exception of Rice. All four may have achieved a great deal during their careers, but have not established themselves as influential or powerful players who can stand up to the likes of Rumsfeld and Powell, and likely not even to their undersecretaries.

Given that much more powerful and clearly authoritative figures could have been assigned to the new Stabilization Group, the question arises as to what the president hopes to achieve by creating the entity and then populating it with leaders who are likely to be constrained in their power. One thing is clear, at least as far as the appointments made thus far: Bush is not prepared to use these chairs for much more than oversight and recommendations -- except so far as they come through Rice.

The Iraq Stabilization Group was created and announced in a way clearly designed to send a warning to Rumsfeld, who claims not to have been informed of anything until Rice delivered her memo. It is obvious that Bush is concerned with Rumsfeld's handling of postwar Iraq. White House officials had few qualms telling the media as much in interviews about the new group, adding that Rumsfeld himself was aware that the reconstruction phase was not his forte.

The group as it is established may be a bit of an embarrassment to Rumsfeld, but he also recognizes that none of the people currently threaten his position of authority. On the other hand, he also sees the ease with which Bush could swap these people out and replace them with true Washington barons -- people who would hold significant political sway in Washington and beyond.

And the apparently roundabout way of sending this message to Rumsfeld demonstrates the tough position in which Bush finds himself. With popularity ratings starting to slip and elections a year away, Bush is growing increasingly concerned with redefining the public perception of his leadership. Bringing the war in Iraq under control is a key part. Bush needs Rumsfeld to readdress the postwar planning for Iraq, to bring the guerrilla campaign under control and to return to the broader strategic business -- pressuring surrounding states to curb overt or tacit financial, political and personnel support to terrorist and militant organizations.

Ah, the oldies are the goodies. Rolled out once more because the Zombies^tm simply refuse to die. Because of honor or just a complete psychotic delusion brought about by too much Oxycontin, the Administration and their toady journalists are trotting out the same old excuses for not finding Weapons of Mass Destruction^tm

So, once more with feeling

The Top Ten Excuses For Not Finding WMDs

10 - Iraqi weapons program personnel fooled Saddam into believing he had a WMD program. These sly jokers also fooled the US into believing this as well.

9 - Saddam managed to scrub Iraq so clean, the CSI team from the TV show of the same name can't even tell they've ever been there. Our vast intelligence didn't detect a thing.

8 - Syria felt so confident about having the US armed forces on their border, they decided to take the WMD hot potato from Iraq. Our vast intelligence didn't detect a thing.

7 - Iran, with their own nuclear bombs just months away, decided that they needed to trade up to Anthrax and VX. Our vast intelligence didn't detect a thing.

6 - Saddam, Über-capitalist, used the vast wealth of Iraq's oil to create a really, really huge Just In Time WMD factory. All he was waiting for was a purchase order from Ossama.

5 - There were so many strategic reasons to take over the country, the only one we thought the American electorate would buy was Weapons of Mass Destruction.

4 - By the time we got around to searching things, the looters had kept themselves warm at night by burning the incriminating documents in radioactive drums they found lying around.

3 - Hey, we found some Trailers of Hydrogen Production. That sounds like Weapons of Mass Destruction if you say it fast enough.

2 - It's a country the size of California. That's a heck of a lot of oil wells and pumping stations to get on line, you know.

1 - We all believed Bill Clinton's CIA director that told us WMDs were there. Just goes to show how soft Democrats are on national security.

[hat tip to James. I would have never stomached the Krauthammer propaganda were it not for his reading. [ I'll send the bill for the dry cleaning -ed] ]

Comforting words for the troops in Iraq.

Rumsfeld 'Surprised' by Saddam Loyalists

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Friday he was surprised by the effectiveness of Saddam Hussein's loyalists to sustain the Iraq conflict long after the end of major combat operations. He called the continuing fighting serious but described it as low intensity.

Fear instilled in the Iraqi people by the ousted leader's former paramilitary force is contributing to the situation, he told an audience of more than 500 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

"I suppose on reflection the thing that probably surprised me the most is the ability that the so-called Fedayeen Saddam people had to terrorize and frighten the rest of the Iraqi people and cause them to not come over to the other side," Rumsfeld said in answer to a question from the audience.

Two U.S. soldiers were killed in an ambush in Iraq on Friday, bringing to 94 the number of American soldiers killed by hostile fire in Iraq since President Bush declared an end to major combat on May 1.

Rumsfeld said coalition forces made 1,700 patrols daily in Iraq and only a tenth of 1 percent involved any kind of armed conflict. "It is a very low-intensity situation, percentage-wise, nonetheless people are getting killed," Rumsfeld said.

Yes, I'm sure the Turkish troops will arive just in time for the big finale.

More fatal bombing, fires northern Iraq

Two employees of the Northern Oil Co (NOC) have been killed and four seriously wounded in a roadside bombing in northern Iraq, the NOC director general said.

The explosion ripped a company bus on the road between Baiji and the town of Riyadh, 40 kilometres west of Kirkuk, the company's director Adel Ghazzaz told AFP.

The people were engineers and labourers going home to Kirkuk after finishing work, Ghazzaz said.

The director general of NOC also said two explosions had caused large fires at two parallel oil pipelines in northern Iraq.

The first explosion started a fire on a pipeline linking the northern city of Kirkuk with al-Debs oil fields, further to the north, Adel Gazzaz told AFP.

A second blast an hour later started a fire on a parallel pipeline running at about five metres from the first, he said.

Firefighters rushed to the area in an attempt to extinguish the fires, Gazzaz added.

Also near Kirkuk, three rocket-propelled grenades were fired on a US military convoy outside the town of Huweija, 50 kilometres west of Kirkuk, witnesses said.

"Unknown assailants fired three RPGs hitting a Humvee and an armoured vehicle, and the armoured vehicle then fell into the Nahr Uh-Zaym river," said Ahmer Hassan.

"I saw two rocket-propelled grenades hit these vehicles and the third missed," said Abed KAzaelaf.

It was not clear if there were any casualties.

A Shi'ite warning to America

Why oh why don't we have anyone of even passing competency in charge?

Sheikh Saleh stresses that the occupation is fought "by our brains and by our religion ... There is no difference between Sunnis and Shi'ites. What the media say is not real. We do have many objections regarding this Governing Council, established under ethnic lines. Most Iraqis suffered from the previous regime; now there's a relaxed period, as if they were released from hospital after surgery. But we are daily watching events, and it's getting worse. Prices have doubled. The occupation is printing a new kind of money, selling industries and commercial establishments. Iraq is a very rich country, but the population is one of the poorest anywhere. The previous regime lost a lot of money. It's not wise to get Iraq straight back into the world system."

Bremer, in line with Pentagon thought, has repeatedly said that Iraqis are disqualified from managing themselves. Sheikh Saleh says, "Iraqis have been qualified to do it since the first month of the occupation, [but not being able to] has brought all sorts of problems to the Iraqis and also to the Americans." The sheikh insists that "we still don't know the political and economic reasons for the occupation. They have used us as a training field, in the beginning of a big strategy."

But will Shi'ite patience run out? The sheikh answers with a beatific smile, "The English left Iraq after the revolution in the 1920s. It started with only five words, here in Najaf."

Well, here we go again. Same rhetoric. Same flaccid press. Same worn out reasoning. Same "Creating Facts On The Ground^tm".

And we're going to be committed by the time anyone starts to question whether our Brilliant Administration is following a plan that is going to lead to Armageddon or not. . .

<sigh>

From Stratfor.

The U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Committee voted to impose sanctions on Syria today. White House officials indicated their support and more -- further significant measures are being considered. Coming on the heels of the Israeli raid west of Damascus and the deployment of forces along the Israel-Lebanon border, the move places Syria in a tight strategic and symbolic bind.

Syria is now in the vise the United States hoped to place it in at the end of the Iraq conventional war. Israeli forces potentially threaten Syria to the southwest and west, as do U.S. forces along Syria's eastern frontier. Now it appears Turkey will rejoin the U.S. coalition. With Turkey's history of poor relations with Syria, Damascus faces a nightmare scenario -- confronting three armies, any one of which could defeat it.

...

For the United States, nothing would reverse perceptions of U.S. weakness more than either a dramatic recapitulation by Damascus or a crumbling of the regime. Clearly, the United States intends -- along with Israel -- to apply that pressure. The issue is how much pressure the United States is prepared to apply. Damascus' problem is that it simply doesn't know -- the unpredictability of its enemies is the most nerve-racking of all. We suspect this will cause them to make a back channel offer of a partial, unverifiable and private accommodation. The United States will reject it -- and the game will be afoot.

The long and winding road.

Brad bitch slaps both Larry Lindsay and Arnold Kling in a move straight out of a Jackie Chan movie.

There's this rather silly meme going around the pseudo Libertarian (or whatever Adam Smith economic meme they truck with) economic blogs. Like all geeks, they have developed their own little symbolic code language for describing their personal bitches against the anti-Christ known as Paul Krugman. Here's a short translation:

C Argument - consequences of policies
M Argument - motives of individuals who advocate policies
T argument - theoretical supposition

Now, the real point which Brad DeLong literally bitch slaps this little bitch session is really rather simple. Regardless of whether Krugman has leave by the Right to make M arguments or T arguments, a lie is still a lie.

If you're a clever enough monkey, you can simply play the game by coming up with an appropriately cloaked lie. Everyone who knows what you are talking about instantly understands the fallacious argument you are making. But it sounds like it could be true.

Humans - especially humans who are not experts in the field - don't know the difference. It sounds rational. So, it becomes a matter of who can convince the uneducated.

That, in the vernacular, is usually referred to as PROPAGANDA. Literally, it's using a lie to advance your particular political purpose.

So, quite frankly, if you think that people like Paul Krugman should be reduced to fighting their battles purely in the C argument realm, even though the thing that Paul Krugman is talking about - i.e. the arguments spewing from the pages of the WSJ, NR and other sources of festering madness - is a complete and utter lie... Well, then you are just part of the propaganda machinery my friend.

The fallacious C argument may be a very complicated fallacy - one that takes an expert to figure out all the nuances, ramifications and assumptions necessary to make such a believable LIE.

But it's still a LIE. And if one is saying that one must resort to disproving the LIE purely in the realm of the twisted logic in which the LIE lives is like saying you have to fight a man with a machine gun bare handed. Yea, if you're really, really good and have a Hollywood effects machine at your beck and call you can do it.

But it's STILL A LIE. And this is where the M argument comes in my friends. If someone is willing to just flat out state something that is provably false - say, that Condoms Don't Prevent HIV - well, there's really nothing you can do but call that a false statement - ill informed, at best. And if the person knows it is a false statement, well... Then the only moral thing you can do at this point is make the M argument.

And if you can't see that, then you I'm afraid you'll have to re-live your adolescent years over again. You're going to simply have to learn that it is very simple to confuse the issue with subtle LIES that only experts can unravel. And when you think that someone should be limited to only exposing those LIES in a technical realm, and chastise them for DARING to bring up the motive of the sleaze ball that knows he's spewing propaganda....

Well, at best I call you a tool.

<sigh>

The Earth is the Center Of The Universe^tm

Creationism is a Science

Intelligent Design is a Science

Evolution is a Religion

Catholic Churches Say Condoms Don't Stop AIDS

It's not just benign, you know. Ignorance kills.

Spending On Iraq Sets Off Gold Rush

Is there really no one guarding the hen house any more? Are we really just all employed in the work of loading gold bars into the dump trucks that are trundling off to tax free shelters in the Cayman islands? Like some surreal Die Hard movie?

I don't understand why the phrase "self respecting republican" isn't an oxymoron.

Let's see. An undercover CIA operative with Non Official Cover gets outed by an administration leak. Can someone explain to me why it isn't simply a matter of figuring out who would have access to this information and tracking things down from there?

I mean, really. I was under the obviously mistaken impression that a NOC was a very, very secret thing. Wow. Now I find out that there are literally 10's of thousands of people in the WH administration that have access to this information.

Boy, do I feel stupid! Under my obviously mistaken world model, there would likely only be a very, very, VERY small number of people who would actually have this information. Thus, one (or more) of this handful of people would be the original source of the leak - whether or not they were the one's who talked to Novak or not.

Man, I'm going to have to re-read all my Clancy novels to figure out how all this stuff works again.

More books in the in basket.

An interesting theory as to why the Administration's acts can be excused - or at least explained - is that the whole Plame leak was a kind of a goof. There seems to be another explanation that makes at least as much sense as the stuff Newsweek is peddling. "Wilson . . . acknowledged to NEWSWEEK that he got no calls from any reporters asking about his wife until he heard from Novak." The implication being that none of the leakers knew they were leaking after Novak's article appeared.

Now, the quaint thing here is that perhaps the reporters calling Wilson after the Novak story broke were simply doing so because the story was now indeed out in the open. That is, they waited until *after* it was out in the open. Wilson being called after the Novak story does not rule out that the reporters were called by the leakers before the Novak story.

Duh.

What? Is the entire journalistic effort at Newsweek completely lost their mind? Are they just desperately spinning to find an answer that protects their President? This is pure psycho babble, and everyone who's shilling this line knows it.

Really people. This is just getting pathetic. Excuse after tortured excuse. Explanation after concocted explanation.

At least get the facts right when you do this stuff.

Turkish Deployment To Iraq: Unintended Consequence.

At some point, U.S. officials will have to decide whether to withdraw troops from the north and allow the Turks to have a greater presence there -- in essence giving Turkey the go-ahead to either swallow the north -- or to stay put and deal with more U.S. casualties. Militarily, U.S. officials might want tens of thousands of Turkish troops fielding major combat operations while tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers withdraw to few well-protected bases and prepare a force projection mission from Iraq into neighboring countries. Politically, it might be a different story.

Protests rock Turkey over Iraq troop decision

Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets across Turkey Wednesday to denounce the government's controversial decision to send troops to Iraq, with police detaining some 60 Kurdish activists.

In Istanbul, protesters chained themselves to the wire fencing of an American high school and shouted "We will not allow our soldiers to be killed" and "We will not be soldiers for the US."

Take a gander at what the current thinking about the interpretation of the data recently crunched by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.

The idea is prompted by data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite. This sees back to when the Universe was about 380,000 years old, and reveals the all-pervading radiation left over from the Big Bang - the cosmic microwave background.

There are fluctuations in this background, like waves in the sea. They are the legacy of the small lumps in the early Universe that gave rise to stars and galaxies.

An infinite Universe would contain waves of all sizes. The WMAP did not see any very large waves. This points to space being finite - for the same reasons that you don't see breakers in your bathtub.

The best explanation for these observations is that the cosmos is a Poincaré dodecahedral space, says a team led by Jeffrey Weeks, an independent mathematician based in Canton, New York. Mathematical models of a spherical, solid Universe edged by 12 curved pentagons produce the patterns seen in the background radiation without any special fine-tuning. "It fits the data surprisingly well," says Weeks.

The dodecahedron is "a nice solution", agrees cosmologist Janna Levin of the University of Cambridge, UK. But other geometries could produce similar patterns in the microwave background, she warns. "It's going to be a surprise if the Universe has chosen such a beautiful platonic form," she says. "And I'd be surprised if the Universe was so small."

Most physicists assume that the Universe is infinite, explains Levin. But Einstein's theories actually say nothing about whether the Universe stops or not.

Well, it's pretty clear that the administration is trying to regain control of the message. And the message is "Beware."

Let's just note that there is little talk of the humanitarian justification for going to war. The Administration seems to have chosen the WMD justification and is going all out to stick to that line. I think the determining factor was likely that it was a matter of "honor". Sure, Rummy was insane, but look at this spoon we found in some guys refrigerator. You wouldn't believe the biological weapons grade bacteria on that thing!

The Administration is maintaining that labs researching biological and chemical weapons are just months away from production and delivery. Something, of course, anyone with any experience in the transition from research to product will simply laugh at.

The obvious point is that the Emperor Has No Clothes. None.

Powell's editorial, Kay's testimony, and now Condi's projection of Saddam as a James Bond super villain. . .

Well. If the world didn't think we were ruled by a bunch of duplicitous war mongering jackals, they certainly do now.

<heh>

One day a reporter asked President Bush when he expected to find the administration official who leaked the information about CIA Agent Plame. Bush was disappointed in the question since it showed that the reporter lacked enlightenment, so he decided to test him.

"I don't know if we’re going to find out the senior administration official. I don’t have any idea. I’d like to. I want to know the truth.”

Before the reporter could reply, Bush struck him with his Zen stick.

“This is a large administration, and there’s a lot of senior officials.”

The reporters scribbled this in their notebooks.

Really people. This is not even something to joke about. Keep your eyes on the goal and pick your fights. This is not something that will do any good for the state and certainly won't do any good for the democratic party.

Play it out on the high ground. Don't sink to this level. It will only end in tears.

Kimberly asks a rather interesting question about Condi's new role in Plan 9 from outer space

Wait… Is this legal?

Yeah, I know; I’m talking about the Bush administration here. They’ve got about as much respect for the law as I do for, say, Richard Perle. (Did I mention I think he should be hanged as a traitor?) Still, I’m wondering how an unconfirmed national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, can be given control over the Pentagon-run reconstruction of Iraq. As far as I know she is accountable to Bush alone because she wasn’t confirmed before the Senate. So how can this be designed to create "a central source of responsibility and accountability," if she can’t be compelled to testify before Congress, when her performance coordinating security and progress in Iraq turns out to be roughly as shabby as it’s been here in the U.S.?

Any constitutional scholars in the house? I’d like a ruling on this, one way or the other. It’s not like it matters if it’s legal or not, not with this administration. They’ll do it anyway. I’d just like to be able to tell my grandchildren how it used to be when the United States of America still had a pulse, and the Constitution that bound us together in dignity was more than fancy toilet paper to “our” politicians.

Oh yea, Rumsfeld seems to have been out of the loop. Is that a sawing sound I hear in the background?

Hmmm.... Let's see. Get rid of Rummy, that draws the fire from the Schadenfreude crowd. Then we consolidate the situation under a person who can simply laugh at Congress when they ask her to testify regarding the situation in Iraq.

Problem solved!

Neo-con fingerprints on Syria raid

Throughout the Iraq war, many of these same people, as well as their close associates in the administration, such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Feith, argued that Syria represented a serious threat to the US and its troops in Iraq, at one point asserting that Damascus was sheltering senior Iraqi leaders and its WMD.

"There's got to be a change in Syria," Wolfowitz said in April, adding that the government was a "strange regime, one of extreme ruthlessness". At the same time, another prominent conservative closely associated with Wolfowitz and Perle, in particular, former Central Intelligence Agency director James Woolsey, was widely quoted on television as saying that the "war on terrorism" should be seen as "World War IV" that should include as targets "fascists of Iraq and Syria".

Within this context, Sharon's decision to attack Syria appears designed to shine the spotlight once again on Syria as a key target in the "war on terrorism". Coming at a time when the neo-cons in Washington are on the defensive over their pre-war claims about the dangers posed by Saddam in Iraq and the welcome which US troops were supposed to have been accorded by the Iraqi population, the renewed focus on Syria conveniently changes the subject.

The fact that Bush appears to have endorsed the attack and justified it publicly as self-defense also confirms that Bush sees the strategic relationship with Israel in much the same way as the neo-cons have long wanted the US president to do.

U.S. May Drop Quest for U.N. Vote on Iraq

I'm surprised they didn't do this long ago. As others have said, it was pretty obvious that there is a lot of schadenfreude going around and the attitude is "you broke it, you bought it."

<sigh>

And then there's the fact of what the US did before the war, and the fact that we ain't going to give up any meaningful control.

Oh well. Hope our troops hold up under the stress. I hope their families hold up under the stress.

Well, you all know by now. Democrats got Bitch Slapped. Arnie wins with 48% of the vote. All I can do is to remind you of this. And another thing. Remember this. Remember how it was done. Remember all of it. The media's part in all of it, the fact that they let him get away with pretty much everything. The red carpet they rolled out to the man.

The same thing will happen in the 2004 election. Count on it.

It's a war, people. A full blown war.

Unleash the dogs. Well, we only have puppies - and they're so cute - but it's all we've got. Let's turn them into ravenous wolves.

You puny Democrats! I kid! I love you all!

Man, there's a lot of people voting. Much, much more than voted last year. I would dearly love to be wrong in my bold prediction and lose the various 5 cent bets I have if it means Davis is not recalled, or Bustamante beats Arnie.

Dare I think such thoughts? Isn't that just asking the powers that be to reach down and stub that horrid bright piece of hope out like a used up cigarrette?

Yi!

Going to be an interesting night.

Man, this is just fantastic. Just perfect. Just exactly what we need at this point.

From Stratfor.

Maulana Azam Tariq -- a top anti-Shiite Sunni sectarian leader and Parliament member in Pakistan -- was shot dead in Islamabad on Oct. 6. Should the Sunnis decide to retaliate against the Shiites, who are likely responsible for the shooting, it could lead to a further fracturing of the Islamist Mutahiddah Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) alliance, which is suffering growing dissent from within its ranks. A weakened MMA is likely to strengthen President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, but also has the potential to lift pressure from al Qaeda if the administration's focus shifts to containing sectarian violence.

Riots Across Pakistan as Slain Sunni Leader Buried

Rioters attacked police and burned Shiite Muslim mosques in several Pakistani cities Tuesday demanding revenge as a hard-line Sunni Muslim politician was buried a day after he was gunned down in the capital.

Three bodyguards and a driver also were killed in the assassination of parliament member Maulana Azam Tariq, the one-time leader of Sipah-e-Sahaba — a banned extremist group known for attacks on Shiites.

In Jhang, the hometown of Tariq's violent movement, and in the normally tranquil capital, rioters exchanged fire with police, smashed shop windows and set ablaze Shiite mosques, gas pumps and a movie theater. At least one person was killed.

Many called for revenge against minority Shiites, raising fear the killing could lead to more sectarian bloodletting

The title is just another shameless attempt at increasing my Google search hits.

Anyways... Check out these three articles from the Asian Times:

A war short on substance, long on form

High-profile raids against low-profile targets, while good publicity, will not win the war in Afghanistan for the United States. Nor will deals with the "devil", in this case the Taliban. But maybe the aim is not to win, but to set the stage for a graceful exit.

The US strategy in Afghanistan has two distinct thrusts: the war against the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the Hizb-e-Islami, and the support of Hamid Karzai's regime. Unfortunately, these two simultaneous endeavors have, at times, worked at cross-purposes.

Any efforts to draft a new constitution, hold elections or bring even a hint of stability to Afghanistan will fail unless the power of the warlords is broken. The only problem is that the US is the chief sponsor of some of the worst warlords.

When all else fails, reorganize

American soldiers in Iraq continue to die and weapons of mass destruction are nowhere to be found. But rather than admitting to failure, and handing the administration of Iraq over to the United Nations, the US continues to plough its own furrow

Check this production out. MSNBC does an excellent job of explaining the whole sordid affair.

[thanks to Lisa for the pointer]

So, I'm still sticking to my bold prediction regarding the outcome of the CA recall election. But since I *never* win anything when I put a nickle on the line, here's my feelings regarding the inevitable election of Arnie, and why it will turn out to be a boat anchor around the republican's collective neck.

1) Arnie will be elected with less than 40% of the vote.

No mandate, no vast popular support. This alone will hamstring him, but it gets worse.

2) We will find out whether a sitting Governor can have civil suits brought against him.

Regardless of the validity of some of the charges, the man obviously has a lot of baggage. I think we're just seeing the tip o' the iceberg, so to speak.

3) There's a heck of a lot of angry democrats.

True, I have no love lost for Gray, but man o man did the recall piss me off. It wasn't a grass roots uprising, it was an artificially created event. There's a lot of people who won't forget that - regardless of how they voted on the recall. You can still vote to have Gray removed and still be very pissed off about the whole thing and the way it was done.

4) The Governor doesn't write the law, he only gets to sign it or veto it.

The problem has always been with the legislature - in particular, the republican minority. So whatever great ideas Arnie has for fixing the problem, he's still impotent to do anything about it unless those ideas become a piece of law.

5) If you think the minority can cause problems, just wait 'till you see what the majority can do.

This isn't a movie. It's real life. And when you have a majority of really pissed off democrats in your way as Governor who ran on a platform of bitch slapping, well... Let's just say it ain't going to be pretty.

6) Arnie really is an idiot.

Digby has a rather entertaining post on this subject, so I'll direct you there. Just let me quote you the salient bit.

In truth, his real life (at least for the last 20 years) has been one of incredibly spoiled and princely pampering, to the point that he has absolutely no clue about what is acceptable behavior because he's been indulged beyond any normal everyday person's ability to even imagine. This is why he says things like, "No one ever came to me in my life and said to me that I did anything, that said 'I don't want you to do that, you went over the line Arnold.'"

I imagine that this is quite true. Nobody tells Arnold Schwarzenegger, "I don't want you to do that." In his world, he is completely free to act with impunity because in his world he is the pasha, the prince, the coddled "product" who is beyond the realm of normal human behavior. His power is the power of a cossetted and overindulged brat.

So, I just have to tip my hat to the republicans. They wanted it so bad they were willing to do anything to get the governorship.

Well, now they're going to wish they had just let Gray self destruct on their own.

Oh yes. The republicans are MASTER politicians.

<giggle>

Master politicians.

Update: Go read this. It simply brings a tear to my eye.

On May 14, exactly six months after he took office, Schwarzenegger released his revised budget, complete with a call for a major tax increase. "This is the price we have to pay for Gray Davis and his mad spending," the governor said.

The following week, an odd coalition -- Christian conservatives, opponents of gambling, anti-tax activists, union officials -- called a news conference at the secretary of state's office. Schwarzenegger had betrayed his promises and misled voters about how he would deal with the budget, they told reporters. They announced they had filed papers to initiate a recall of California's first replacement governor. And so it began again.

A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies.

All text is verbatim from senior Bush Administration officials and advisers. In places, tenses have been changed for clarity.

It's like an R. Robot condensation of the past three years.

[Thanks to the 50 Minute Hour for the pointer]

Sept 3:
Powell: U.S. to introduce U.N. resolution

The Bush administration said Wednesday it would introduce a draft United Nations Security Council resolution that would authorize a multinational force and encourage Iraqis to set a timetable for holding elections and establishing self-rule.

United Nations -- Secretary of State Colin Powell says the views of the permanent members of the Security Council are beginning to converge on the details of a new resolution on Iraq, especially on the issue of a timetable for self-governance.

"I'm pleased, and I think my colleagues in the P-5 [permanent five members] are pleased, that we're seeing some convergence of view with respect to a resolution," Powell said September 25.

Secretary of State Colin Powell said Thursday he expects Security Council action "in the very near future" on a revised U.S.-sponsored resolution giving the United Nations a larger role in Iraqi peacekeeping and reconstruction. Administration officials meanwhile are claiming progress in preparations for an Iraq donors conference later this month in Madrid.

No further Security Council meeting on Iraq has been scheduled. A U.S. diplomat said there would be "a pause" during which time the ideas raised at Monday's Security Council meeting would be brought to Washington for discussion.

The debate over the resolution is expected to last days, if not weeks.

Boy, I have my head down for a couple of hours and WHAM! Bush comes up with a doozy! Single handedly he smacks down all the psycho babble flack the right has been throwing up over the last week.

So, here's a small dedication to the Right Wing of American Politics regarding the Plame Scandal:

US seeks to calm Pakistan after remarks by Armitage

Richard Armitage, the US deputy secretary of state, ended a visit to Pakistan on Monday by distancing himself from remarks he made last week questioning the commitment of part of Pakistan's security services to the war on terror.

"I said there was some question of some individuals in the security services who might not have the same affection - that is the same energy and the same regard - for the efforts as President Musharraf," he said.

"In no way do I have any sign that security forces as institutions are anything but 200 per cent behind the nation, behind the president [Musharraf]," said Mr Armitage.

He added Pakistan had "a special relationship" with the US which "President Bush treasures particularly".

Mr Armitage caused uproar in Pakistan last week with his comments in Washington. Pakistani officials said such public pronouncements made it increasingly difficult for Gen Pervez Musharraf, the country's military ruler, to support the US while facing a lobby of vocal Islamic nationalists.

Yesterday's remarks followed Mr Armitage's statement in Washington when he said: "I personally believe that President Musharraf is genuine when he assists us in the tribal areas [on the Pakistan-Afghan border] and he has [assisted the US] from inside of the border [with Afghanistan], but I do not think that affection for working with us extends up and down the rank and file of the Pakistani security community".

Those remarks prompted strong reaction in Pakistan where some officials said Mr Armitage was implicitly questioning Gen Musharraf's control of the country's military and its powerful intelligence service known as the ISI.

The intelligence service of Pakistan, a crucial American ally in the war on terrorism, has had an indirect but longstanding relationship with Al Qaeda, turning a blind eye for years to the growing ties between Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, according to American officials.

The intelligence service even used Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan to train covert operatives for use in a war of terror against India, the Americans say.

The intelligence service, known as Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I., also maintained direct links to guerrillas fighting in the disputed territory of Kashmir on Pakistan's border with India, the officials said.

American fears over the agency's dealings with Kashmiri militant groups and with the Taliban government of Afghanistan became so great last year that the Secret Service adamantly opposed a planned trip by President Clinton to Pakistan out of concern for his safety, former senior American officials said.

The fear was that Pakistani security forces were so badly penetrated by terrorists that extremist groups, possibly including Mr. bin Laden's network, Al Qaeda, would learn of the president's travel route from sympathizers within the I.S.I. and try to shoot down his plane.

U.S. Troops Occupy Iraq Oil Refining City

BEIJI, Iraq - U.S. forces removed the police chief of Beiji from office Monday after a weekend of fighting and riots between pro-Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) demonstrators, Iraqi police and U.S. soldiers in this important oil refining city north of Baghdad.

Oh yes, plan 9 is unfolding exactly as we had hoped. Now that Condi is in charge, you'll see the fruits of all our efforts and worship at the feet of our brilliant strategy.

From Stratfor.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai recently hinted that he wants to integrate the Taliban into the country's future political order. If true, this would be an about-face from his earlier stance toward the Islamist movement. The contradiction reflects a realization that the Taliban cannot be overlooked in the construction of the new constitutional framework. If he pursues his apparent strategy, Karzai risks getting caught in the cross-fire between the Taliban, his government partners from the Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara and Turkmen tribes and his main supporter, the United States -- with virtually no gains to show for it.

White House to Overhaul Iraq and Afghan Missions

The White House has ordered a major reorganization of American efforts to quell violence in Iraq and Afghanistan and to speed the reconstruction of both countries, according to senior administration officials.

The new effort includes the creation of an "Iraq Stabilization Group," which will be run by the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. The decision to create the new group, five months after Mr. Bush declared the end of active combat in Iraq, appears part of an effort to assert more direct White House control over how Washington coordinates its efforts to fight terrorism, develop political structures and encourage economic development in the two countries.

It comes at a time when surveys show Americans are less confident of Mr. Bush's foreign policy skills than at any time since the terrorist attacks two years ago. At the same time, Congress is using President Bush's request for $87 billion to question the administration's failure to anticipate the violence in Iraq and the obstacles to reconstruction.

"This puts accountability right into the White House," a senior administration official said.

The creation of the group, according to several administration officials, grew out of Mr. Bush's frustration at the setbacks in Iraq and the absence of more visible progress in Afghanistan, at a moment when remnants of the Taliban appear to be newly active. It is the closest the White House has come to an admission that its plans for reconstruction in those countries have proved insufficient, and that it was unprepared for the guerrilla-style attacks that have become more frequent in Iraq. There have been more American deaths in Iraq since the end of active combat than during the six weeks it took to take control of the country.

"The president knows his legacy, and maybe his re-election, depends on getting this right," another administration official said. "This is as close as anyone will come to acknowledging that it's not working."

Guess the right wing punditry is going to need to get some new talking points after this quiet revelation... Naw... It's still a good line.

The creation of the stabilization group appears to give more direct control to Ms. Rice, one of the president's closest confidantes, who signed the memorandum announcing it. For the first two and a Azaelf years of Mr. Bush's presidency, Ms. Rice often seemed hesitant to take a more active role, eschewing the kind of hands-on approach for which Henry A. Kissinger and other national security advisers were known, and viewing her job chiefly as providing quiet advice to Mr. Bush.

Seems like Rice is being set up as the fall girl to me.

Anna Perez, Ms. Rice's communications director, will focus on a coordinated media message — a response to concerns about the daily reports of attacks on American troops and lawlessness in the streets.

Well, you know how the movie ends.

Electronic chip to detect Sars

This should make the next season of the super bug.

Singapore hopes to launch in January an electronic chip that will give an almost instant diagnosis of whether a person has Sars, dengue fever, flu or some other respiratory illness.
Ren Ee Chee of the government-run Genome Institute of Singapore told the island republic's Sunday Times newspaper that the respiratory pathogens detection chip would undergo testing soon in conjunction with an unnamed US company.

Detection probes on the chip, which is about the size of a 10p coin, will analyse saliva or nasal mucus dropped on to it and deliver a rapid diagnosis.

'Blogosphere' to reach 10 million, almost all dead

This is a head scratcher.

'Too little' oil for global warming

Oil and gas will run out too fast for doomsday global warming scenarios to materialise, according to a controversial analysis presented this week at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. The authors warn that all the fuel will be burnt before there is enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to realise predictions of melting ice caps and searing temperatures.

Defending their predictions, scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say they considered a range of estimates of oil and gas reserves, and point out that coal-burning could easily make up the shortfall. But all agree that burning coal would be even worse for the planet.

......

Their analysis suggests that oil and gas reserves combined amount to the equivalent of about 3500 billion barrels of oil ­ considerably less than the 5000 billion barrels estimated in the most optimistic model envisaged by the IPCC.

The worst-case scenario sees 18,000 billion barrels of oil and gas being burnt ­ five times the amount the researchers believe is left. "That's completely unrealistic," says Aleklett. Even the average forecast of about 8000 billion barrels is more than twice the Swedish estimate of the world's remaining reserves.

Iraqis' patience wears thin as America delays handover

In another blow to the CPA, unemployed former soldiers in Saddam Hussein's disbanded army clashed with troops in Baghdad and the southern city of Basra on Saturday in violent protests that left at least two Iraqis dead. The British Army said one of its soldiers shot dead an armed Iraqi during an angry demonstration in Basra by hundreds of men who had gathered to collect redundancy payments after being laid off from the Iraqi military.

Major Simon Routledge said a British soldier heard gunfire and then shot and killed an Iraqi holding a weapon. British troops also fired rubber bullets to disperse the crowd.

Hundreds of former Iraqi soldiers also rioted at a disused airport in Baghdad where redundancy payments are handed out. Officials at a nearby hospital said one Iraqi had been killed and several wounded in the violence. The US army said two of its soldiers were wounded.

Cook: 'Blair admitted to me that Saddam had no usable WMD'

Bark! Bark like a dog!

Tony Blair privately admitted that Saddam Hussein could not attack British or United States troops with chemical or biological weapons two weeks before Britain went to war against Iraq, Robin Cook alleges today.

The claim by the former foreign secretary that the Prime Minister misled Parliament and committed Britain to an illegal war is made in his memoirs, which he sold to The Sunday Times for a reputed £400,000.

The Real Patriot Act

Hey, I got an idea on how to pay the $87 billion dollar price tag for Iraq: let's raise the gas tax by $1 per gallon. That will drain money from the Saudis while simultaneously reducing our reliance on the very thing we fought the war over - oil. This would be great for the environment as well as a stimulus for more efficient energy usage in the US - the market would make mincemeat of this problem. As a bonus, it would change the image the world has of us from selfish, Hummer-driving louts to good global citizens overnight.

On second thought, this will never fly with the duplicitous, ideologically driven Administration which got us into this costly, ridiculous occupation in the first place.

And hoo-boy! Is that ever wrong!

Wanna Buy a Bridge?

They tell us with straight faces that our national security interests and the future of Iraqi freedom are riding on the U.S. taxpayer: buying pickup trucks for Iraqis at $33,000 each; purchasing 600 radios and telephones for Iraq at $6,000 a piece; spending $54 million for a comprehensive consulting technical study for the Iraqi postal system; shelling out $800 million to train 1,500 Iraqi police officers at $530,000 per; building $400 million maximum security prisons at $50,000 a bed; spending $100 million to enroll 100 Iraqi families of five in a witness protection program at $200,000 a person; buying 40 garbage trucks at $50,000 apiece; shelling out $100 million to pay for 500 experts to investigate crimes against humanity at $200,000 a person; and spending $1.5 million for museums documenting Iraqi atrocities.

Spend anything less than the $20 billion in this year alone, the administration tells us, and Iraqi confidence will be hurt, extremists will be strengthened and Iraq's democratic future will face certain doom. Believe that?

These guys just crack me up.

Palestinian suicide attack kills 19 bystanders in Haifa restaurant

A Palestinian woman wrapped in explosives blew herself up Saturday inside a seaside restaurant popular with both Arabs and Jews, killing 19 bystanders, including four children. The bombing prompted new calls for Israel to act on threats to expel Yasser Arafat.

The lunchtime attack, which wounded at least 55, ended nearly a month of relative calm. One of the deadliest in three years of violence, the bombing came on the Jewish Sabbath and a day before the start of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.

<heh>

Back in Film School some of us secretly signed up for Army ROTC (as a way to pay for our useless B.F.A. degrees). It seemed like a good move, and it freed up our student loan money for more useful pursuits (drugs). While in ROTC the Army psychologist said we had a narcissistic personality disorder with a barely tenuous grasp of reality - at best. The opinion was that we were therefore probably best suited for front-line combat, as either cannon fodder or possibly (if we took medication) snipers. This placed us in a special category of ROTC (called iROTC or 'insane' ROTC), one that was run by the CIA. As a cover we were discharged from the normal ROTC program and were to return to the 'appearance' of being normal students, even though we were now being guided by CIA 'handlers.'

This double-life was not the easiest thing to pull off. One day we would be talking about the 'mise-en-scène' of French 'new wave' cinema, the next day we would be learning how to breach soviet missile silos and disarm SS-24 thermonuclear warheads. Summer vacation consisted of training schools at secret bases around the U.S, and intense indoctrination at CIA-Langley, VA. It was both hectic and confusing living this way. Imagine the embarrassment of running late for class and your fully automatic UZI falls out of your jacket and clatters down the Azaell in front of the other students.

After school ended the CIA moved us to New York, maintaining our cover identities while we worked on commercials and television. Luckily our Special Forces regulation buzz cuts worked for both of our 'occupations.'

At this time there were many covert ops. Mostly in Central Europe on special assignment for the United Nations. The U.N. occasionally having need for special operatives (though they publicly deny this). We were the soldiers people reported seeing on "The Black Helicopters."

When the first Gulf War came we were deployed deep in Iraq with operatives of the SAS to ‘paint’ targets with lasers for smart bombs (dropped from carrier based F/A-18’s). We were there when Kuwait was liberated. It was a heady time! We like to think of it as our 'salad days.'

We were secretly discharged from 'the company' in 1996 and we got back to filmmaking. Eventually writing and shooting “The Blur of Insanity.” A true story based on our lives (pre-iROTC). We thought our military past - secret as it was - was over.

Then 9/11 happened...

Special "Spy vs. Spy" edition.

Well, when it rains, it pours. Scandals everywhere. Wasn't it just a few weeks ago that the entire Right Wing of American Politics (RWAP) was immune to scandals? Sure there was the occasional Trent Lott, Rick Santorum and Judge Roy Moore. But their "scandals" actually played to important pieces of the right wing base. Rush Limbaugh's ESPN comment would have ended up being another in this string of "slip ups" by a faction on the right were it not that Rush has a major drug problem.

I guess this was common knowlege in Washington circles.

Leak of Agent's Name Causes Exposure of CIA Front Firm

The leak of a CIA operative's name has also exposed the identity of a CIA front company, potentially expanding the damage caused by the original disclosure, Bush administration officials said yesterday.

The company's identity, Brewster-Jennings & Associates, became public because it appeared in Federal Election Commission records on a form filled out in 1999 by Valerie Plame, the case officer at the center of the controversy, when she contributed $1,000 to Al Gore's presidential primary campaign.

After the name of the company was broadcast yesterday, administration officials confirmed that it was a CIA front. They said the obscure and possibly defunct firm was listed as Plame's employer on her W-2 tax forms in 1999 when she was working undercover for the CIA. Plame's name was first published July 14 in a newspaper column by Robert D. Novak that quoted two senior administration officials. They were critical of her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, for his handling of a CIA mission that undercut President Bush's claim that Iraq had sought uranium from the African nation of Niger for possible use in developing nuclear weapons.

Well, not really. But at this point, it's getting pretty hard to tell. SARS turns out to be something that seems to be able to mutate and adapt at will.

Just kidding.

After all, we seem to have strong suspicions that the cute little creature known as the palm civet was the original source of the SARS virus. Nothing evil could ever come from such a cute and cuddly creature.

Follow the link to the Science Daily article, and you'll note that the underlying implication of Mindell and Rest's paper is fundamentally disturbing, regardless of how you believe the disease developed.

Graduate student Joshua Rest and associate professor David Mindell, both of the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, used a technique that detects recombination by analyzing the gene for a protein known as RNA dependent RNA polymerase (RDRP). In their analysis, one end of the RDRP gene appeared most closely related to group 3 coronaviruses, but the other end appeared distantly related to all three groups, suggesting that the RDRP gene in SARS-CoV had been cobbled together from parts of RDRP genes taken from different coronavirus lineages sometime in the past.

Our results do not mean that human infection by SARS-CoV is linked to the particular recombination event for which we found evidence," said Mindell. "But demonstration of recombination in the SARS-CoV lineages does indicate its potential for rapid, unpredictable evolutionary change, and this is a potentially important cAzaellenge for public health management and for drug and vaccine development."

Oh the weather outside is frightful
But the fire is so delightful
And since we've no place to go
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

Hey, it could be just a freak genetic event, and SARS isn't really the X-Man of the Corona virus family.

Oh, wait a minute. RDRP is a rather interesting gene, isn't it?

Weird.

From Stratfor.

Polish troops in Iraq have found four French-built anti-aircraft missiles that were built this year, Polish Defense Ministry spokesman Eugeniusz Mleczak told Reuters Oct. 3. The troops found the Roland-type missiles in an ammunition depot near the region of Al Hillah, approximately 55 miles south of Baghdad, on Sept. 29, Mleczak said. The Roland anti-aircraft system is a short-range air defense missile used against aircraft flying at low and medium altitudes.

The discovery of the missiles will send sparks flying in both Washington and Paris. Iraq's possession of new anti-aircraft missiles doesn't necessarily mean that France sold them to Baghdad. Paris may have sold the weapons, although it has denied any such arms transfers, or they might have come from a third party that acquired the missiles from France and re-exported them. Washington will now want to know which country that was, and it will be breathing down Paris' neck for answer.

The timing of Poland's announcement may conveniently provide the United States with leverage to gain French cooperation on a new U.N. Security Council resolution, in which Washington seeks approval for a multinational force deployment in Iraq. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Oct. 3 that the U.S. draft resolution would be revised and ready within the next two days for presentation to the Security Council. French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said recently that Paris would not approve the draft resolution unless a shorter timetable for a transfer of power to a sovereign Iraqi government was included.

Over at the big picnic, Rich Procter puts the whole Novak/Plame affair in perspective from a pillaged transcript of a taped conversation at Sam Houston Elementary School, in Midland, Texas.

TEACHER: I want to know why you didn’t turn in your homework, George.

GEORGE: I did turn in my homework.

TEACHER: You didn’t.

GEORGE: The homework was completed. It was turned in.

TEACHER: Did you hand it to me?

GEORGE: My colleagues – and I trust they’ve told me the truth – have sworn to me that the homework was handed in.

TEACHER: But I don’t have it.

GEORGE: I have assured my parents and my classmates that my paper was turned in. That should more than satisfy you.

TEACHER: But it’s not on my desk.

GEORGE: See, now you’re making your problem MY problem. The fact that you can’t find my homework in no way proves that I didn’t do it.

TEACHER: But...

GEORGE: A survey of my classmates indicates that 53% of them believe that I completed this homework.

TEACHER: You mean your buddies? The ones who came to your birthday party last weekend, with all the circus animals?

GEORGE: I’m focusing on the truth, ma’am, because that’s what I do. I’m focused. Engaged. Fully engaged, and focused. I’ve presented irrefutable documentation that proves that my homework was done, and handed in. I believe this should answer all your questions.

Okay, I'm taking the next flight off this rock.

WMD: 'You have got to be kidding

Two DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] agents currently serving in Iraq, who also voiced bitterness about other aspects of US Iraq policy, spoke on condition of anonymity to Asia Times Online. The first, a 30-year veteran of the agency, complained that "the fixation on weapons is alienating intelligence staff", calling it an "obsession".

Officials in Washington now confirm that former Iraqi officials who had defected and were handed over to the CIA by the INC, the exile opposition group led by CAzaelabi, provided them with information on Iraq's WMD program, which the Bush administration relied on to press its case for war.

In Iraq, this was confirmed by the same DIA agent. "The statements on WMD that the INC guys brought in matched conclusions they [Bush cabinet members] already had. We looked at the info and said 'you can't be serious, you have got to be kidding'."

. . .

This DIA agent, who has served as an interrogator at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where the US holds alleged terrorists from Afghanistan called "illegal combatants", also rejected claims still alleged by the vice president that there was a relationship between Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda and Saddam's regime in Iraq. "There were four Iraqis in Guantanamo. More people had British passports than Iraqi ones."

Now serving in Iraq as a security expert, the DIA agent criticized post-war policy as well, referring to what he described as "the coalition's pursuit of a single point panacea with a semblance of political organization to hand over the country to them", meaning the undue trust placed in CAzaelabi's organization, as well as Iyad Alawi's Iraqi National Accord. He also did not mince words with the staff of the office of the Coalition Provisional Administration (CPA), headed by L Paul Bremer. He viewed Bremer's young staff as immature and inexperienced, citing the case where an aide to Bremer did not want to issue weapons licenses for a political organization to provide for its security,"she's worried about issuing a few weapons licenses when they have whole armies".

. . .

A lieutenant-colonel in the DIA who specialized in terrorism and the Muslim world also ridiculed the claims connecting Iraq and al-Qaeda, adding that administration officials relied on evidence provided by Laurie Mylroie in her book The War Against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks: A Study of Revenge. "From her book," he said, "It was evident she hadn't spent one day in the Middle East but she was close with Wolfowitz and as a result we had a guy on staff [at the DIA] whose job for two years was to debunk her allegations."

Microsoft May Face Class Action Over Security

Microsoft May Face Class Action Over Security
October 3, 2003 (2:26 p.m. EST)
TechWeb News

Microsoft was slapped with a lawsuit in California earlier this week alleging that the company's security practices are too complex and allow hackers to exploit vulnerabilities in its software.

The suit, filed Tuesday in Los Angeles Federal Court by a lawyer representing a mother of two, claims unfair competition and violation of a pair of California consumer-rights laws, one of which is intended to protect the privacy of personal information on business's databases.

According to the suit, the woman's Social Security number and financial information were stolen over the Internet.

More important in the long run, the suit asks to proceed as a class action suit, which could potentially bring in millions of plaintiffs in a broad-based attack on Microsoft. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and legal costs.

Some of the language in the lawsuit, according to news reports on the Reuters wire service, echoes a report issued last week by a panel of security consultants and experts, who blasted Microsoft for its poor security practices and said that its dominance of the desktop is a prime contributor to the wave of recent attacks, including worms as MSBlaster.

Microsoft has said it would fight the lawsuit.

Before the war, one of the primary arguments, it seemed, for going to war was "Now that we have all those troops there, we have to use them or our credibility will be ruined". In other words, we had to make good on the bluster or the terrorists would think we're weak and react accordingly.

At the time, one of the points I brought up was that if we win the war and completely screw up the peace, then our credibility would be even more severely damaged. And the people who had done everything wrong leading up to the war had absolutely no hope of doing anything right after the war.

History is not going to be very kind to GW and his band of merry men.

From Stratfor.

Hearty self-confidence now creates exactly the opposite effect from the one the administration desires. They look like the old Alfred E. Neumann slogan -- "What, me worry?" Some pronouncements of progress make us wonder what war they're watching. Entirely aside from the WMD fiasco, the inability to project a sense of realistic concern leads the country to doubt that the administration has a plan. The public seems to have a sense that the administration will yet devise a plan, but no belief that there is one yet.

In our view, the president needs to give a "Blood, Toil, Sweat and Tears" speech acknowledging that he knows what everyone else knows -- the situation in Iraq is tough and the course of the war uncertain. That at least would end the growing sense that the administration is watching a different war than the rest of us. Such a speech would be a confidence-builder since no plan can be based on fantasy.

If the president doesn't deal with the problem quickly, it ceases to be a domestic political problem and turns into a serious geopolitical issue. The war on al Qaeda is extremely complex and will take a long time. If Bush cannot create a consensus around the war, al Qaeda's hand will be immeasurably strengthened. It was hoping for just this sort of evolution. Therefore, the president stabilizing his position is not simply an issue of domestic politics. If Bush loses because of Iraq, the consequences in the Islamic world will be substantial and unpleasant for the United States.

He picked his strategy. He'd better make it work, because nothing will be more unsettling globally than strategic failure. From where we sit -- and no one would elect us to anything -- it isn't that hard. You start by admitting what everyone already knows and move on from there. The American public can handle just about anything but the feeling that its leaders are out of touch with reality.

I'm kind of surprised that this hasn't shown up around any of the blogs. I guess Novak/Plame is sucking up too much oxygen still.

Study: Wrong impressions helped support Iraq war

As you can see by this graph, it's pretty obvious who's responsible here.

And note that those who listen to NPR were the smartest of all.

Why some news audiences had more accurate impressions than others was less clear.

Kull cited instances in which TV and newspapers gave prominent coverage to reports that banned weapons might have been found in Iraq, but only modest coverage when those reports turned out to be wrong.

Susan Moeller, a University of Maryland professor, said that much reporting had consisted of "stenographic coverage of government statements," with less attention to whether the government's statements were accurate.

The study found that belief in inaccurate information often persisted, and that misconceptions were much more likely among backers of the war. Last month, as in June, for example, nearly a quarter of those polled thought banned weapons had been found in Iraq. Nearly Azaelf thought in September that there was clear evidence that Saddam had worked closely with al-Qaida.

Among those with one of the three misconceptions, 53 percent supported the war. Among those with two, 78 percent supported it. Among those with three, 86 percent backed it. By contrast, less than a quarter of those polled who had none of the misconceptions backed the war.

Morons.

Attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq increase

US General: Iraq Enemy Becoming More LetAzael and Sophisticated

U.S. Suffers U.N. Setback Over Iraq; No WMD Found

Annan Raises Doubts About Quick Self-Rule for Iraq

Congo: A Hell on Earth for Women

What can I say? I'm ashamed that there is simply nothing the US is doing about this. More than that, the whole US/Iraq/N Korea/Iran/Plame/WMD thing is "sucking up all the oxygen" so that massive disaster that is DR Congo can't even make it into the public's attention.

“She came in last evening. Five armed men had raped her the night before, a few kilometers from here,” explains Mathilde Muhindo, director of a social assistance agency of the Roman Catholic diocese of Bukavu, on the eastern border of the Democratic Republic of Congo. “This morning, she was still crying. I cried with her,” says Muhindo, in whose eyes traces of tears are visible. Through a window outside her office, you see the profile of a woman, her shoulders slumped, her face buried in her hands, sitting crumpled on the edge of a bed. Looking away from the building, the eye meets an infinitely tranquil countryside. In the distance, the hills of Rwanda emerge from the mist, which lends a deep gray hue to the mirror-smooth waters of Lake Kivu below.

Atrios thinks it's because she's white. I think it's because if the main pillar of WMD propaganda is kicked out, the whole thing will start to crumble. And the only reason the current effort is underfoot to run Miller out of town on a rail is because the Great Oz has lost a bit of his iron grip.

Miller could have been any color of the rainbow. A Black/Hispanic Jewish Arab who converted to Islam, had a sex change and was bisexual and they would have still propped her up for as long as needed.

It is nice to see signs of a disturbance in the dark side of the force for a change, though.

Ah, our strategic friends, the Kurds. Let's see, 10,000 new Turkish troops in Tikrit. . Putting the northern oil fields on ice for the "moment". . .

I guess everything is proceeding according to the grand NeoCon plan.

From Stratfor.

Strategically, northern Iraq was the most economically and politically independent of Iraq's regions. The Kurds have experienced de facto independence under United Nations protection since the end of the Gulf War in 1991. They have their own security forces, manage their own budget and patrol their own streets.

Kurds are also, despite strenuous public denials, separatist. Resurrecting northern Iraq's energy sector would present the Kurds with de facto control of the northern oil fields and an export line through Turkey. Turkey fears that an economically viable Iraqi Kurdistan would not only declare independence, but also could spark separatist violence in eastern Turkey where the Kurds are in the majority. Viewed in that light, putting the resuscitation of the northern fields on ice would both mollify Ankara, a key U.S. ally, and force the Iraqi Kurds to abandon (or at least delay) their secessionist plans for economic reasons.

The strategy is working quite well. By concentrating efforts on the south, Iraqi exports are already at the level the CPA had budgeted for year's end. Even with no additional increases in Iraqi exports the CPA will most likely bring in $1 billion than it originally budgeted. Perhaps it is no coincidence that CPA officials stated this week that an additional $1 billion in investment would be sufficient to restore Iraqi production to 3.0 million bpd generated before the 1990 war. The numbers mesh quite nicely.

<heh>

Well, they may have removed the front page, but it's still in the google cache. Even better, the September archive is still available.

Here's the tag: This site chronicles whether Missouri will remain a so-called political swing-state through the 2004 elections. Missouri Republicans are on the march here. Not clear whether this is a freak occurence or the start of something more permanent. Animal entrails, political tea-leaves and the detritus of daily news clips will be scoured to divine the pace and direction in the power shift now underway. The title of this blog is not random. It marks an inflection point in current Missouri politics. On that day, the worm began to turn.

Don't 'cha just love that last sentence?

Ah, Republicans....

The Cranky Guru pointed us to this gem of an article that would have slipped under our radar otherwise. It's simply appalling.

Ann Coulter is giving pep rallies to Boy Scouts. I'm just stunned.

I grew up in the Boy Scouts. Never made it to the order of the Arrow to learn the secret hand shake, but I had an otherwise illustrious career in the Scouts. I loved the organization, went to many a Jamboree and several Freeze-a-ree (hey, in Colorado, we get badges for every 10 degrees below zero while we're camping). Scouting taught me a lot of good stuff - survival, honor, integrity. Heck, all the stuff that makes America great.

But this is simply appalling.

The cowards and quislings of the Democratic Party have been exposed as the Neville Chamberlain of their day," Coulter said, setting the tone with her discussion of Iraq. "That will be the historic legacy of the Democratic Party. Apparently they think that's worth a warm handshake by Susan Sarandon."

Such rhetoric is hardly noteworthy in today's culture, but what made it sting was the fact that it came at an official Boy Scout event, with the Boy Scout emblem displayed prominently behind Coulter. Sitting in the audience, surrounded by cheering adults, I couldn't help wonder how the sons of "cowards and quislings" could possibly feel welcomed in the Northeast Georgia Council of the Boy Scouts of America.

Bush was different. The gap between his school of thought and that of old-value conservatives could yet produce a dichotomy on the right as clear-cut as the differences between Communists and socialists after World War I. "Flag conservatives" like Bush paid lip service to some conservative values, but at bottom they didn't give a damn. If they still used some of the terms, it was in order not to narrow their political base. They used the flag. They loved words like "evil." One of Bush's worst faults in rhetoric (to dip into that cornucopia) was to use the word as if it were a button he could push to increase his power. When people have an IV tube put in them to feed a narcotic painkiller on demand, a few keep pressing that button. Bush uses evil as a narcotic for that part of the American public which feels most distressed. Of course, as he sees it, he is doing it because he believes America is good. He certainly does, he believes this country is the only hope of the world. He also fears that the country is rapidly growing more dissolute, and the only solution may be—fell, mighty, and near-holy words—the only solution may be to strive for World Empire. Behind the whole push to go to war with Iraq is the desire to have a huge military presence in the Near East as a stepping stone to taking over the rest of the world.

That is a big statement, but I can offer this much immediately: At the root of flag conservatism is not madness, but an undisclosed logic. While I am hardly in accord, it is, nonetheless, logical if you accept its premises. From a militant Christian point of view, America is close to rotten. The entertainment media are loose. Bare belly-buttons pop onto every TV screen, as open in their statement as wild animals' eyes. The kids are getting to the point where they can't read, but they sure can screw. So one perk for the White House, should America become an international military machine huge enough to conquer all adversaries, is that American sexual freedom, all that gay, feminist, lesbian, transvestite hullabaloo, will be seen as too much of a luxury and will be put back into the closet again. Commitment, patriotism, and dedication will become all-pervasive national values once more (with all the hypocrisy attendant). Once we become a twenty-first-century embodiment of the old Roman Empire, moral reform can stride right back into the picture. The military is obviously more puritanical than the entertainment media. Soldiers are, of course, crazier than any average man when in and out of combat, but the overhead command is a major everyday pressure on soldiers and could become a species of most powerful censor over civilian life.

Michael Kinsley does a fantastic job putting to words the way I've felt about hypothetical questions. Thank "Bob" for competent writers.

Everytime I hear a politician - republican or democrat - say "I don't answer hypothetical questions" I want to smack them across the cheek until their brain kicks into gear and they stop this silly psycho babble.

Just Supposin'

This is silly. Hypothetical questions are at the heart of every election in a democracy. These are questions the voters must answer. Voters are expected to imagine each of the candidates holding the office he or she is seeking and to decide which one's performance would be most to their liking. Every promise made by a candidate imposes two hypothetical questions on the voter: If elected, will this person do as promised? And if this promise is kept, will I like the result? The voter cannot say, "I don't answer hypothetical questions." And voters cannot sensibly answer the hypothetical questions they've been assigned without learning the answers to some hypothetical questions from the candidates.

Hypothetical questions are essential to thinking through almost any social or political issue. In law school they're called "hypos," and the process is called "salami slicing." Imagine this situation, and tell me the result. Now change the situation slightly—does the result change? Now change it in a different way—same result, or different one? It's just like an eye exam, where you peer through a series of alternative lenses until you zero in on the correct prescription.

From Stratfor.

Al Qaeda is an organization built to survive. The United States is an organization built to evolve. Up to now, al Qaeda has demonstrated its ability to survive while the United States has clearly evolved enough to prevent the Yemen attacks. The issue now is simply whether the United States can learn fast enough to threaten al Qaeda's ability to regroup.

This is not simply a quantitative question. Obviously, al Qaeda can replace a fallen commander. The issue is whether the replacement is as competent an operative as his predecessor, or whether the new appointment represents the degradation of al Qaeda's capabilities. Whether the new commander has responsibilities for Iraq isn't clear. We would guess that Iraq is a separate theater of operations for al Qaeda, with its own command structure. That would mean that al-Sha'ir has one successful operation to his credit in Saudi Arabia -- the Riyadh attacks -- and one significant failure in Yemen.

The jury is out on al-Sha'ir's capabilities and therefore out on al Qaeda's success at regeneration. However, it will be important to watch events in the region in coming months. Obviously the region is important. But more important now will be to watch whether the new generation leaders can effectively replace the old ones. Al-Sha'ir will be under some pressure to prove himself to his uncertain troops. Therefore, he needs to put some points on the board following the Yemen failure. We suspect that he will try to act quickly to prove himself. More than this, his success or failure will measure how long the war will go on.

Astronomers claim dark matter breakthrough

The identity of the Universe's dark matter may finally have been discovered. In what seems to be the most convincing claim for dark matter so far, researchers in England and France say gamma rays coming from the centre of our galaxy show Azaellmarks of these ghostly particles.

The research has only just been made public, so the team is still waiting for a response from other dark matter experts. But though the researchers are cautious, there is no hiding their excitement. "I've dropped everything else to work on this," says Dan Hooper of the University of Oxford. "We're really excited," adds his colleague Céline Boehm, also of Oxford. "I'm cautious but it's surprising everything fits so well."

The identity of the Universe's dark matter, which outweighs the visible stuff by at least a factor of seven, is the outstanding mystery of modern astronomy. Scientists think it must exist because its gravity affects the way galaxies hold together. But the particles do not emit any electromagnetic radiation so they have never been detected directly. No one knows what the particles are like, or exactly how they are distributed.

However, because dark matter "feels" gravity like ordinary visible matter, it is a fair bet that it clumps in the centre of our galaxy. So the team turned their attention to a distinctive pattern of gamma rays coming from the centre of the Milky Way (see graphic). The sharp signal, which has an energy of 511 kiloelectronvolts (keV), is believed to be due to the annihilation of electrons and positrons ­ the antimatter equivalent of electrons.

US amendment on Iraq tries to address UN's security concerns

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that the major obstacle for the world body to go back to Iraq is the worsening security situation. On Aug. 19, he lost his Special Representative to Iraq, Sergio de Mello, in a deadly car bombing at the UN headquarters in Baghdad.

Schwarzenegger bark may prove worse than bite in first 100 days

Oh yes, this will turn out to be a brilliant plan.

"I can kill that tax with my signature alone and I will do exactly that," Schwarzenegger said to cheers of more than 500 supporters.

No way, said state Department of Finance spokeswoman Anita Gore.

Representatives for state employees, Indian tribes and backers of driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants held similar sentiments about Schwarzenegger's 100-day agenda. The resistance foreshadowed the gridlock that could dominate, even paralyze the Capitol if Schwarzenegger wins Tuesday's election and declares war on priorities held dear by a Democrat-controlled Legislature. The backlash also revealed the Capitol's elaborate system of checks and balances that typically prevent speedy action and quick results.

"I think he's got a little bit to learn. He ought to wait until he's elected," said Senate leader John Burton, the San Francisco Democrat widely considered one of the Capitol's most powerful figures.

This is a recycled rant from a piece Michael wrote back last November - before we were a blog. Given all the current blogosphere comment on the anti-libertarian and anti-conservative bias in academia and such, I thought I'd recycle it. Got to make sure the cheese gets aired every once and a while.

There are other ways to bleed.

From Stratfor.

South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun has said it is important to see a clear path toward peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula before sending more troops to Iraq. In essence, Roh said that only after the United States re-engages North Korea in dialogue to end the ongoing nuclear standoff will Seoul consider sending additional forces to Iraq. South Korea is not the only country setting its own terms with Washington on troop deployments: Several other nations are now offering some sort of assistance, but only at a price.

Turkey is sending 10,000 troops to Tikrit.

According to al-Zaman, the Turkish government is considering sending 10,000 troops to Iraq, many of which will be deployed in the Tikrit region (the birthplace of Saddam Hussein). The US military apparently hopes that Sunni Muslim troops like the Turks will be able to deal with the resistance in the Sunni Arab regions better than the US Army has been able to do. I doubt this is true. The guerrillas are Sunni Arab nationalists who have grievances toward Turkey, and they won't hestitate to attack the latter. That the coming of the Turks is still in the cards shows that the US is the uncAzaellenged governing authority in Iraq. Hoshyar Zebari, the appointed interim Foreign Minister, had earlier attempted to shoot down the idea of Turkish troops being deployed in Iraq, saying that the Interim Governing Council had decided against allowing armies of neighboring countries to come in. The Iraqis appear not to have a say in the matter. The US military is badly over-stretched, and is having to call up 15,000 reservists as it is, and desperately needs the Turkish division (or 2/3s division). Few other countries have shown a willingness to send their military to Iraq, and if the Turks are willing, the US will have them. That their presence will make the Iraqi Kurds nervous and upset doesn't matter to Washington.

Well, I just have to say that the only thing this Administration can win is a war. And that only with the military that was built under Clinton. Sound partisan? Well, how do you feel about headlines like this?

U.S. Must Counteract Image in Muslim World, Panel Says

The United States must drastically increase and overhaul its public relations efforts to salvage its plummeting image among Muslims and Arabs abroad, a panel chosen by the Bush administration has found.

"Hostility toward America has reached shocking levels," the panel stated in its report, which will be released Wednesday. "What is required is not merely tactical adaptation but strategic, and radical, transformation."

You see, acting like a bully, acting unilaterally, acting like you want to teach the Muslims a lesson... Well, it has an absolutely predictable reaction.

And everyone on the right thinks that this is a good thing.

The report added that "spin" and manipulative public relations "are not the answer," but that neither is avoiding the debate. A copy of the report was made available Tuesday to The New York Times.

The panel warned that the war in Iraq and the intensified conflict in the Middle East had increased anger at the United States, and that people throughout the world were ignorant of or misinformed about American policies.

Because all we have is Spin, and spin isn't what's needed. All we are projecting to the world is an image of a bully, a jerk and someone who isn't willing to deal fairly with the Arabs.

"A process of unilateral disarmament in the weapons of advocacy over the last decade has contributed to widespread hostility toward Americans and left us vulnerable to letAzael threats to our interests and our safety," said the panel, the United States Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World.

The committee found that the State Department spent about $600 million last year on its programs to advocate American policies, and $540 million more for the Voice of America and other broadcast networks.

If the $100 million to expand economic aid in the Middle East is included, the report notes, the total is about three-tenths of a percent of the Defense Department budget.

Examining those figures, however, the panel found that only $150 million of the "public diplomacy" budget was spent in Muslim-majority countries, and most of that went to exchange programs, overhead and salaries. The government spent only $25 million on "outreach programs" in the entire Arab and Muslim world.

"To say that financial resources are inadequate to the task is a gross understatement," the report concludes.

Oh, and to all those out there who actually believe in the "flypaper" theory, you might want to remember. You catch way more flies with honey than you do with battery acid.

Morons.