December 2003 Archives

Special Counsel Is Named to Head Inquiry on C.I.A. Leak

Attorney General John Ashcroft disqualified himself on Tuesday from any involvement in the investigation into whether Bush administration officials illegally disclosed the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer. At the same time, the Justice Department brought in a special counsel to lead the politically charged case.

The two steps suggested that the three-month-old investigation had reached a crucial juncture at which Mr. Ashcroft's continued involvement was considered politically untenable, officials said. Leading Democrats had pushed for months for Mr. Ashcroft to remove himself from the case because of his close ties to the White House, but he had consistently resisted those demands until Tuesday.

Anyone but me find it deliciously ironic to hear the words "With greater information sharing comes more unauthorized disclosure" in a government report on the topic?

For the tightest lipped Administration ever, the idea of non-controlled disclosure must be particularly distasteful.

From Secrecy News (Project On Government Secrecy).

FBI INFORMATION SHARING STILL FACES OBSTACLES

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has improved its ability to share information about terrorist threats with other parts of government but still has major impediments to overcome, a searching review by the Department of Justice Inspector General (IG) has found. These obstacles include technological
cAzaellenges, doubts about FBI credibility and the uneven quality of Bureau information.

"The FBI's fundamental information-sharing problem is the inability to move classified information... securely outside of the FBI. Due to the FBI's [information technology] limitations, even e-mails cannot be forwarded securely to the CIA. Instead, FBI personnel must print a paper version of the e-mail and provide this to their CIA counterparts," the IG stated in a new report (p. 13).

Meanwhile, other law enforcement agencies often doubt FBI assurances that it has shared all the relevant information it has.

"FBI officials told us that state and local law enforcement agencies often perceive that the FBI has more information than it is willing to share," the IG noted.

I'd vote for any of the 9 candidates and still be just as fired up even if Dean didn't win. This kind of suggestion is pretty unseemly and flat wrong.

Dean: Backers may not vote if he's gone

"If I don't win the nomination, where do you think those million and a Azaelf people, Azaelf a million on the Internet, where do you think they're going to go?" Dean said during a meeting with reporters. "I don't know where they're going to go. They're certainly not going to vote for a conventional Washington politician."

Bishop attacks Blair as 'white vigilante'

Thought this quote was rather priceless.

Dr Wright says: "For Bush and Blair to go into Iraq together was like a bunch of white vigilantes going into Brixton to stop drug dealing. This is not to deny that there's a problem to be sorted, just that they are not credible people to do it."

Identity Crisis
How to have a national ID card that doesn't threaten civil liberties.

But a privacy-friendly card is feasible if it follows one simple rule: verification, not identification. In other words, the card would confirm identity but wouldn't allow the government to pick you out of a crowd. There's a model: In 1995, Canadian entrepreneur George Tomko invented an innovative technology that made it possible to lock packets of data in encrypted files, using a fingerprint as a private key. After clearing a background check, the users of a Tomko-like card would receive a digitized packet of information that said, for example, they were cleared to cross a particular border. They'd download the parcel onto a card and lock it with a thumbprint.

Using this card at a border checkpoint, they'd swipe it and then provide a thumbprint. If the print decrypted the file, the system would verify their identity. Because the fingerprints wouldn't be stored in a central database, individuals would retain complete control over how much personal information was revealed. To maximize privacy, the system would keep no identifiable records of who had passed through, and it would not be linked with any other databases that might allow predictions of future behavior.

Technology alone won't prevent mission creep. After the card's deployment, Congress would have to prohibit the government from accessing private fingerprint databases or linking them with other information without cause. Such legislation is already in the pipeline: Russell Feingold (D-Wisconsin), the only senator to vote against the USA Patriot Act, is sponsoring a bill to restrict the use of predictive data mining. It revives a requirement that the Patriot Act eliminated, limiting the most invasive surveillance technologies to those who have been identified as unusually suspicious.

And a little bit of Mad Cow commentary thrown in for flavoring:

The Iraqi guerrillas have mounted an impressive counteroffensive over the past few days. In the week following the capture of Saddam Hussein and a rapid U.S. offensive based on related intelligence, Iraqi guerrillas reduced their operations dramatically. The guerrillas were clearly attempting to reorganize their forces in the wake of U.S. intelligence successes. This would be a difficult operation to pull off, and we wondered whether the guerrillas would be able to do so. They were.

It should be noted that the tempo of operations has decreased substantially. It is also unclear whether even the current level of operations is sustainable or represents a temporary surge over Christmas and New Year's, paralleling the Ramadan offensive. While that remains to be answered, the indisputable fact is that, over the week of Dec. 22, the guerrillas have carried out a series of successful operations. The geographic location of the operations is more constrained than before, being concentrated in Baghdad and in an arc of roughly 40 miles radius. Operations in and north of Samarra have declined.

The most interesting attack was the operation at Karbala, where Thai and Bulgarian troops were killed along with Iraqis. What was interesting about the operation was its complexity. It involved four suicide bombers plus additional attackers armed with lighter weapons. Particularly interesting in the Karbala attack was its resemblance to attacks by al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Guerrilla attacks combined with suicide bombers in a carefully organized assault is a Azaellmark of al Qaeda rather than Baathist operatives.

There are two possibilities here. First, foreign jihadists are moving in to fill the space left by the Baathists. Second, tactical cooperation grows between Baathist and jihadist forces. In either case, two conclusions can be drawn. The number of attacks has diminished even as their effectiveness has not. Also, something interesting might be happening in the doctrine and organization of the revived guerrillas.

Well Handy Andy, have at it. Comments are back on. I guess I should count it a mark of honor to have you residing under my silly bridge.

Just a request to the others commenting, though. Please don't feed the troll. It's annoying enough as it is.

Thanks.

Over at BOP, there's an interesting post up about Dennis Kucinich, Nothing But Net. At times, I found some of the conclusions non obvious from the line of reasoning used but still an interesting analysis.

The economics of the localist left simply do not work: it is impossible to call for higher wages for the working class - and simultaneously slash living standards by 50%. Regardless of what the numbers on the check say, slashing 50% of the energy budget of the United States means slashing meat, imports, travel, and private space from the list of sustainable consumption. It is impossible to have the body of heath care workers - who are, afterall, not engaged in production - with an economy that cannot export, as Kucinich's protectionist trade war promise would do. It is impossible to both clean up the environment, and force companies to keep old, high pollution factories going. It is impossible to reduce green house gas emissions, and be anti-nuclear power. These paradoxes, and a dozen others, are only resolvable if one accepts that the average American will have to Azaelve his real standard of living under pacificistic austerity. While there is a growing realization - witness the New York Time's piece on energy independence a few days ago - a growing realization in the public that the energy problem is, somehow, at the crux of the current political crisis, the Pacficist Austerity solution has long ago been rejected.

This is why the pacficist left is the target for the Republican Party - which likes to portray itself as the party of techno-optimism: namely that technological advances will overcome environmental costs that internal combustion imposes. They are the alarmists and pessimists. The Republicans do not actually need to fund, for example, altnerative fuel research, merely talk about it - to present as being those with boundless faith in the human ability to work through problems. Which is a slogan way of saying that the present can avoid paying for dealing with the problem, because the future will solve it. Hence, as noted before, if Kucinich did not exist, the right wing, at least, would have to invent him. And quite frequently does.

The bottom line is that Kucinich, by being a spokesman for pacificistic austerity - the localist left - represents a very old constituency, one that had found the internet, with its low cost of dissemination, very much in line with its basic aesthetic. In a world where a polished looking website is free - the Kucinich internet space is filled with barebones looking sites, with very crude senses of graphic presentation. It isn't a matter of economics - looking crude and austere is an aesthetic component of the idea of an air, water and a piece of string life style. Thus, he has not managed to capitalize on the internet, because he does not, by and large, speak to people whose economic existence comes through the internet. He does not speak to the people who came into existence because of the internet, nor who see the internet as their essential medium. For the Pacificist left, the internet is cheap postage.

For the people who drove the Dean Campaign and the Clark Movement, it is, and was something else.

U.S. incomes falling, poverty rate rising

Andy's right. I have no patience for banning all the subnets he can post from. So, comments are gone. When MovableType 3.0 comes out, perhaps the new stuff they are promising will allow more control over the the comments.

It's not just an idea, it's a self replicating structure.

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.

Bush's man rejects Blair weapon claim

Tony Blair was at the centre of an embarrassing row last night after the most senior US official in Baghdad bluntly rejected the Prime Minister's assertion that secret weapons laboratories had been discovered in Iraq.

In a Christmas message to British troops, Blair claimed there was 'massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories'. The Iraq Survey Group (ISG) had unearthed compelling evidence that showed Saddam Hussein had attempted to 'conceal weapons', the Prime Minister said. But in an interview yesterday, Paul Bremer, the Bush administration's top official in Baghdad, flatly dismissed the claim as untrue - without realising its source was Blair.

It was, he suggested, a 'red herring', probably put about by someone opposed to military action in Iraq who wanted to undermine the coalition.

'I don't know where those words come from but that is not what [ISG chief] David Kay has said,' he told ITV1's Jonathan Dimbleby programme. 'It sounds like a bit of a red herring to me.'

The irony.

Four Bombings Kill 13 in Iraq

"It was a coordinated, massive attack planned for a big scale and intended to do much harm," he said.

Tyszkiewicz called it the largest attack against foreign forces in his sector of south-central Iraq, which is patrolled by 9,500 coalition forces, including 2,400 from Poland. He said the death toll could have been significantly higher, but troops opened fire on the bombers as they rushed toward their targets, preventing the attackers from detonating their letAzael loads inside the bases.

I'm just saying. . .

The loser's guide to getting lucky

Take the case of seemingly chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not.

I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities.

I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside.

I had secretly placed a large message Azaelfway through the newspaper saying: "Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £250."

This message took up Azaelf of the page and was written in type that was more than two inches high.

It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

Unlucky people are generally more tense than lucky people, and this anxiety disrupts their ability to notice the unexpected.

As a result, they miss opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else.

They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends.

________
Post inspired by Sebastian, where in a fit of luck I found this post whilst searching for the BBC reference above.

The whispering wheel

A new Dutch invention can make cars, busses and other vehicles no less than 50 percent more efficient and thus more environmentally friendly. Better still, the technology is already available; it all comes down to a smart combination of existing systems.

. . .

All this is made possible by an ‘in-wheel' electric engine, in fact nothing more than a normal electric engine turned inside out.

The outer wall of a traditional electric engine is a cylinder lined on the inside with copper wire. If electricity is fed into the copper wire, the current will circle the cylinder on the inside at high speed. Cylinder and wire together are called the ‘stator' (because it doesn't move).

To change the electricity running along the inner wall of the cylinder into movement, another part of the engine comes into play: ‘the rotor'. This is in fact an axle, mounted in the centre of the cylinder, with permanent magnets attached to it. The electrical current in the stator pulls the rotor magnets along and the axle starts to turn.

The wheel works precisely the other way around. The fixed part of the engine - the stator - is now on the inside. The wire is wrapped around it.

The moving part of the engine – the rotor - is no longer an axle fitted with magnets but a ring running on the outside of the stator.

The magnets are fixed on the inside of this ring. If power is fed into the engine the magnets will – as before - follow the current, but now it's the ring on the outside, which will turn.

Eureka
And that's what makes ‘the whisperer´revolutionary; a ring functioning as a wheel. By just putting a tire on it you can drive a bus, a car, anything with it. Since the wheel is in fact the engine, no axles or any other friction-producing and therefore energy-wasting mechanical parts are needed.

Piping hot n' fresh over at Poliblog.

Oy.

20,000 feared dead in Iran quake

Iran has appealed for international aid as the death toll from a devastating earthquake climbed to 4,000 and officials warned that thousands more are likely to be found dead.

At least 30,000 people have been injured in the quake in southeastern Iran, local officials said.

The Iranian government said as many as 20,000 people may have died in the quake, which was centered near the ancient city of Bam about 610 miles (975 km) southeast of the capital, Tehran.

The quake struck at 5:27 a.m. Friday (8:57 p.m. ET Thursday) as people were sleeping.

"I have lost all my family. My parents, my grandmother and two sisters are under the rubble," a 17-year-old girl told Reuters.

State media said two of Bam's hospitals had collapsed, leaving many of the staff injured. The remaining hospitals are reportedly full and rescuers were attempting to transported the wounded to neighboring towns.

Not even a mouse.

The attacks in Iraq clearly mean that the Iraqi guerrilla forces have not been completely disrupted. Rocket and mortar attacks are the mark of the Baathist forces, while suicide and car bombings are the mark of the jihadists. An attack by the Baathists on Americans' Christmas day is meant to be a message: We are still here. The question in Iraq, as in Israel, is what does "here" mean. If they can sustain these attacks, it is a significant fact -- the war is far from over, despite major U.S. efforts. If this is a Christmas surge that cannot be maintained, then it represents a major American victory. This weekend will give us a sense of what it means.

The assassination attempt against Pakistani President Musharraf clearly represents a major Islamist attempt to reverse the trends of the past few weeks. As most Muslim countries flip over into the American camp, the pressure to destroy at least one pro-U.S. Islamic regime mounts. The Pakistani theater of operations, which is in some ways the most important theater, remains the ultimate test for the Islamists. It will be the theater in which the ultimate fate of al Qaeda will be measured.

Musharraf has moved into the American camp. That means that in the long run, the Islamist position in Pakistan will be undermined unless his government can be shattered. Following U.S. successes over the past few weeks, killing Musharraf and disrupting Pakistani operations against Islamist forces would represent a major and badly needed success. The Islamists are struggling to achieve this, but they have now failed twice.

Certainly, nothing that happened in the past 24 hours reverses the trend line the United States has established. It does, however, show some serious attempts to reverse that trend line. What we don't know is how many additional attempts the Islamists and Baathists may be able to make. We certainly know, as expected, that they are not finished. We do not know how much trouble they are in. The next few days will be very revealing.

Interesting post up over at the Liberal Oasis.

So, since we are very likely to be in charge, at least figuratively speaking, it’s time to start acting like it.

The CW assumes (as Dick Morris does) that we are a loony fringe.

We are not, but others will pounce on anything that hints otherwise, as they already do.

That means in our words and our actions, we must always be cognizant that we are always speaking to more than just our fellow liberals.

We must phrase our arguments -- whether on TV, in the blogosphere, in letters to the editor, or in personal conversations – in ways that find common ground and speak to the fundamental concerns and hopes of non-liberals.

. . .

This is also serious business. We should act like it, and look like it.

We are about to be collectively put in the hot seat. Get ready.

Update: just to point out the obvious, this is one liberal who isn't in

Durables Orders Plunge Unexpectedly

New orders for long-lasting U.S. manufactured goods plunged unexpectedly in November, falling at the steepest rate in more than a year across a broad range of categories, a government report said on Wednesday.

The Commerce Department said orders fell 3.1 percent to a seasonally adjusted $180.07 billion -- defying Wall Street economists' expectations for a 0.8 percent rise. It was the biggest monthly orders decline since a 6 percent tumble in September 2002 and followed a revised 4 percent increase in October.

Every single category of durable goods suffered weaker demand in November, with orders for everything from computers and aircraft to new cars and defense goods falling.

The category the Commerce Department calls non-defense capital goods excluding aircraft orders, which is seen as a proxy for business spending plans, fell 5.9 percent to a seasonally adjusted $55.59 billion. It was the biggest decline in this segment in more than 1-1/2 years since a 7.8 percent fall in March 2002.

A drop in this category may dampen budding hopes that businesses were taking up the spending baton from stalwart American consumers -- something analysts and Federal Reserve officials say is vital to keeping a solid expansion on track.

Some-Time, Part-Time and One-time Terrorism

"If you think the terrorist threat stems from organized groups, I think you miss the problem we see today," emailed M.E. Bowman, deputy general counsel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in response to a remark made in the previous issue of Secrecy News.

"The 9/11 hijackers were not an organization. Nor did they associate themselves overtly with al Qaeda, which sponsored them. And this proves the point!" Mr. Bowman wrote in a recent article.

"The larger threat is not al Qaeda, but the person who, while otherwise leading a normal life somewhere in the world, decides to become a terrorist."

Now that we're officially past the solstice, and the end of the year is drawing to a close, it's the season for reflection.

20 Slides of The Year That Was^tm.

My favorite slide:

Lego "Rebuild Iraq" Set Said To Carry Heavy Price And Responsibility

"Will Keep Them Occupied For Years To Come" Says Toy Maker, Cheney

Sure to be on every kid's Christmas list this year, and most likely forgotten by the next, is Lego's new mammoth "Rebuild Iraq". A whopping 985-billion-billion-piece playset with no instruction manual, the set will only be available to children of the United States but may require the help of the UN.

"The possibilities are endless," says Johann Liechner, Senior Vice President of Marketing for Lego. "Iraq can be rebuilt in any number of ways - it's a big responsibility."

With the big responsibility comes a hefty price tag. Children should be well advised that it may take close to a year's worth of incessant whining, lies, and threats if there is to be any chance of getting Iraq.

Myself, I can only stand in stunned awe at the spectacle we have been witness to.

I've listened to good friends tell me with a straight face that killing 300,000 Iraqis would be a great "object lesson" for the middle east to not fuck with us. I've read completely rational posts justifying torture in pursuit of terrorism. I've had my own mother tell me with a straight face that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 - something she still insists to this day. We've witnessed the art of legal parsing taken to new heights by the very people who still believe the Clintons are the spawn of Satan for Bill's little act of legal parsing in the nineties (among other things). I've seen those on the Right completely throw out any semblance of fiscal conservatism in their blind support for Bush's military strategy in the "war" on terror.

I've even witnessed Libertarians throw out all principles of individual liberties in their greed to see if they can take their piece of the government give-a-ways Bush is buying votes with. I've seen hard core free traders turn more than a blind eye to the overtly protectionist actions taken by this administration to buy the votes they couldn't buy with tax goodies. Only then to see the small government types stand idly by while the Administration tops it all off with a 400+ Billion dollar expansion of Medicare in a butt naked attempt to buy the Florida vote.

Ye gods. What a year. Nothing personal to you, the year 2003. But I'm going to be glad to see you go.

Interesting contrarian POV.

William Pfaff: Saddam's capture bodes ill for Bush's re-election

As for Bush, Saddam's capture symbolically changes the president from war leader to the builder of a new Iraq. Electorally, he is likely to regret this change.
.
If questioning Saddam Hussein doesn't produce the famous weapons of mass destruction that were threatening Jerusalem, and British and American bases in the region - not to mention New York and Washington - the question of what the war was all about is reopened.
.
The failure to get new information will confirm what so far has been the unanimous testimony of Iraqi scientists and officials, who no longer have any reason to lie and every reason to tell the truth: The weapons programs were all terminated after the first Gulf War. Washington, significantly, had already let the issue of weapons of mass destruction drop even before Saddam's capture.
.
Had Karl Rove, Bush's chief domestic political adviser, been consulted in time, he probably would have told the president to seize Saddam but hide him until the first week of next November, and produce him - trussed on a turkey platter - on the eve of the election. But as 600 soldiers were involved in the capture and rumors fly, that was not practical.
.
As things stand, the triumph of Saddam's capture has 11 months during which to ebb. By next November it risks being covered over by an accumulation of bad news from a liberated but unpacified Iraq.

Rosemary reaches under the chin and unzips the human mask, revealing a rather Lovecraftian face. Like Ara, I have another question for Rosemary.

Perhaps she can provide a list of U.S. cites that will be the recipient of righteous vengeance if the next terrorist attack turns out to be propagated by a member of the Christian Identity Movement or some other indigenous terrorist. After all, there was just an arrest of a home grown terrorist down in Tyler, Texas. An honest to "Bob" cyanide bomb capable of killing several thousand people if detonated in an enclosed area - say, like a concert Azaell.

What U.S. city would she visit destruction down upon in retribution? Who's children, parents, lovers, family and friends would she condemn to death? Remember, 10,000 to 1. So some city in the U.S. deserves 3 Million deaths as vengeance for Timothy McVeigh's actions in Oklahoma City by Rosemary's logic.

Just wondering.

US Republicans signal readiness to resume Iraq weapons probe

The apparent change of heart came after the CIA acknowledged late last month that it "lacked specific information" about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction when it compiled a 2002 intelligence estimate that served to justify the invasion.

Congressional Republicans also found themselves under renewed pressure last week after Bush, when asked in a television interview to clarify whether he had hard facts about Iraqi weapons or just feared Baghdad may acquire them, replied: "So what's the difference?"

Senator Carl Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the remark was "a stunning revelation" of Bush's "thinking and of his decision to go to war."

"There is a huge difference between having something and seeking something," the lawmaker observed.

Democratic Senator Joseph Biden said it was important to complete the Iraqi weapons review to maintain US credibility in the world at large.

"The idea that we're going to go in next time and say, by the way, Kim Jong Il in North Korea's about to do the following, who the heck's going to believe us?" Biden asked in a CBS interview.

But General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed confidence the weapons of mass destruction will be eventually found the same way US troops caught up with deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein -- through cooperation of Iraqi individuals.

"The same thing's going to be true in WMD," Myers assured in an interview with "Fox News Sunday."

Iraq: Kurds To Demonstrate For Autonomy

Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) leader Massoud Barzani announced Dec. 21 that Kurdish groups will hold a political rally in northern Iraq to proclaim the Kurds' historic right to oil reserves. Demonstrators will present a request to the Tamim Province governor that Kirkuk be included as part of a semiautonomous Kurdish region in the north. Several Kurdish parties -- including the KDP and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan -- led Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) member Jalal Talabani, have submitted a bill to the IGC calling for a federal system that would ensure Kurdish autonomy over three northern provinces.

Then there's a longer version from the Kurdish media.

Iraqi Kurds to ’assert historic rights’ over oil city at big rally

Kurdish parties will stage a big rally Monday to assert their historic rights over the oil-rich northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, an official of one of the parties told AFP on Sunday.

Officially the protest has been called to celebrate the capture of former dictator Saddam Hussein. But demonstrators plan to present a petition to the governor of Tamim province demanding "the return of Kirkuk to Kurdish areas," said Mohammad Molla Nabi, a leader of the Communist Party of Kurdistan.

They will also demand "the return of Kurds expelled after 1974" from the region by Saddam in his "Arabization" drive.

Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) leader Massoud Barzani said Sunday that Kurds want Kirkuk back for its historic significance and not for its oil riches.

Barzani and Jalal Talabani, head of the other main Kurdish party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, along with the three other Kurdish members of the interim Governing Council, have submitted a bill to establish a federal Iraq without waiting for a constitutional convention promised for 2005.

The bill foresees the expansion of Kurdish autonomy from the three northern provinces, which rebel factions ruled in defiance of Saddam, to include Tamim and parts of the ethnically mixed provinces of Nineveh and Diyala.

These areas were majority Kurdish at the time of the 1957 census and have only since had their ethnic makeup changed because of the deliberate policy of "Arabization" carried out by Saddam’s regime, the bill says.

Not holding my breath, mind you.

Crime and punishment

Can such a proceeding avoid the bitter accusations of "victor's justice" that have always accompanied war crimes trials? The risks are many. But if America develops the right approach -- supporting Iraqi efforts to confront their own history; allowing international bodies a supervisory role; inviting Saddam's victims in Iran and Kuwait to detail their own grievances -- then the prosecution of Saddam Hussein may prove to be a turning point in a troubled war.

. . .

For all the pitfalls ahead, the White House should see the trial as a real opportunity to open minds about the Iraqi regime, not just in Iraq but around the world. The Bush administration has been so hostile to international courts that even in the midst of a struggle to win over Muslim public opinion, it has barely tried to capitalize on America's role in putting Milosevic on trial for genocide against Muslims in Bosnia. But America has an opportunity here to genuinely win over Arabs and, less important, antiwar Europeans.

Hussein's brutal record must be demonstrated. The Iraqi leader, who styled himself as a god, will have to face the prospect of being remembered in history only as a criminal.

"The only predictable outcome of the Iraq trial is that nobody--in Iraq, in the United States, in the Middle East, and in the international public gallery at large--will find it suited to the gravity and barbarity of Saddam's assault on humanity...Saddam Hussein made the impossible possible, but his citizens and successors now have the chance to do the same. If Iraqis can emerge from the coming trials with the dignity, wisdom, and commitment to the rule of law that Saddam denied them, that will be their greatest revenge."

Juan Cole provides one. But I'm sure that the superior logic and analytical capabilities of the RWAP are just too darned quick to be caught thinking up the wrong tree without a ladder.

Lessons of Lybia: War isn't always necessary.

The one thing standing between Qadhafi and a return to stability for his dictatorial regime (and efflorescence for his potentially rich economy) was Washington's new campaign against weapons of mass destruction. Libya didn't have much of that sort of thing, though it had dabbled, and it wasn't important to Qadhafi any more. The conflict in Chad (in which Libya is accused of using chemical weapons) had died down. Washington was making it a quid pro quo that Tripoli give these lackluster and small programs up in order for Libya to reenter the world economic system on a favorable footing. It was an easy decision.

So the real reason Qadhafi just folded is economic. And the lesson to be drawn here is that under certain circumstances, economic pressure can work, and remove the need for war.

The sanctions on Libya were very different from those on Iraq, and peace thinkers need to study why the former worked but the latter didn't. One thing is clear; the Iraq war has hindered, not helped, US-Arab relations, and it is not the reason for which Qadhafi has made up with the West, a process that began some time ago.

One caveat: Qadhafi hasn't offered to step down or become less dictatorial. This isn't an advance for democracy. The Bush administration, despite its rhetoric of democratization, still has to choose in the Middle East between having malleable, known strongmen in power, or having unpredictable democracies that might elect radical Islamists or others odious to Washington. I wouldn't bet a lot on the democratization policy. The US if anything has been urging countries like Tunisia and Yemen to be less democratic and less concerned about civil rights, in the cause of stamping out radical Islamism.

SimCandidate

All of which leads to a question: The U.S. presidential campaign may be the first true election of the digital age, but it's still missing one key ingredient. Where is the video-game version of Campaign 2004? Political simulations are practically ubiquitous in the gaming world, but you're more likely to find a game that will let you stage a Spartacus-style slave revolt than one that will let you win the Iowa caucuses.

This is a strange state of affairs, because presidential politics lends itself naturally to the idiom and audience of today's games. Political campaigns are already structured like games, with an escalating series of discrete competitions that determine the eventual winner. In addition, there's an existing body of readily available data, going back many decades, that could be harnessed to craft the simulation. And the country is filled with Monday-morning Carvilles who cultivate their own theories on how to win the Rust Belt, or why the Republican southern strategy is overrated.

The game mechanics would be relatively simple: a mix of Risk, SimCity, and a sports franchise simulation. Each candidate could be ranked according to various attributes, the way a football sim distinguishes between the injury-prone and the invincible, the fumblers and the golden arms. Some candidates play well on television, while others do better at rallies. Some are genius fund-raisers. Others don't connect well with Latino voters. You pick (or build) a candidate with those attributes in mind and then plan a strategy, starting with a limited campaign pot. You could skip Iowa to concentrate on New Hampshire, woo the national media and Wall Street financiers in the Northeast corridor, or spend all your cash talking trash about your opponents via negative ads.

A number of best-selling sports simulations could be easily translated into the world of politics. The latest version of Sega's World Series Baseball 2K3, for example, gives you an entire organization to manage. You can trade players, nurture minor leaguers, negotiate salaries, and sign free agents. Player emotions are even factored in. Bench a highly paid prima donna for a few days, and his productivity will diminish, just as it would on the real-world diamond. Sure, more people may be passionate about sports than are passionate about politics, but by the same token there are far more people out there interested in politics than in urban planning, and SimCity manages to be one of the most popular games of all time.

Best of all, a campaign sim could let you experiment with different historical conditions. Could Clinton have won in '92 if the economy had improved a year earlier than it did? Would Nixon have won in '68 if we hadn't been at war in Vietnam? You could even borrow a popular convention from the world of sport sims: dream match-ups. Run Reagan against Clinton, or have George W. compete against his Poppy in 1988.

Brad DeLong posts the director's cut of his article to be published in The American Prospect.

Thoughts on Rubinomics

There were, broadly speaking, two domestic policy strategies possible for the incoming Clinton administration. The first was a double-or-nothing Social Democracy strategy. Republicans had created a big deficit? Fine. Let solving the deficit problem be the responsibility of some future Republican administration. Keep the deficit constant (or maybe rising a bit) as a share of GDP while pursuing Democratic priorities: restructuring health care so that even Americans who were not comfortably off could afford to go to the doctor, expanding social insurance to provide better benefits and real retraining for workers who had lost their jobs, repairing the large gap in infrastructure, restoring public investment priorities, making sure the $200,000+ a year crowd paid their fair share of taxes, providing real incentive--like a carbon tax--for industry and the economy to rest lightly on the environment.

This potential strategy had two problems. The first problem was Congress. The Democrats had an organizational majority, but not an ideological majority. Many Democratic members of Congress thought like Republicans (Billy Tauzin, for example), but were still Democrats because substantial voting blocks had not yet forgiven their state's occupation by union troops under General "Beast Butler" and could not yet bring themselves to vote for the Part of Emancipation. Was there sufficient Democratic support in Congress for a Social Democracy--particularly given the fact that many Democratic Congressional leaders believed that Mr. 43% from Arkansas had no business asking for deference and were totally, utterly clueless about what the political consequences would be if they failed to enthusiastically support President Clinton. The failure in the spring of 1993 of the Clinton short-term economic stimulus program was one indicator of the lack of "centrist" Democratic Congressional support for Social Democracy. A second indicator was the extraordinarily rapid collapse of "centrist" Democratic Congressional support for the budget's environmental policy component--the BTU tax--which melted like snow when the American Petroleum Institute brought in its lobbying heat lamps.

The second problem was the economic risk associated with the double-or-nothing let-the-deficit-alone strategy. The economic growth trend underlying the business cycle had slowed markedly in the late 1970s and stayed low throughout the 1980s. Only by the most egregious cherry-picking of start and end dates could ideologues like Robert Bartley claim to find "seven fat years" in the 1980s--and even then the years were not fat, but merely not emaciated. Governments that run large and persistent structural deficits find, first, that their appetite for cash diverts spending that would otherwise flow into productive investment. They find, second, that investors get nervous and capital starts to flee the country--further diminishing the flow of spending into productive investment. Low investment means low output growth, stagnant productivity, and static real wages not just around a recession but over the entire business cycle. Would it be good for the country if--as seemed likely to those of us making forecasts of the interaction of the deficit and the economy--Clinton's inauguration were followed by year after year of very slow economic growth? And what would be the chances of passing any Democratic legislative priorities if the macroeconomic news was never very good?

Part 1: How Saddam may still nail Bush

The Christmas blockbuster from the Pentagon studios was a dream. This was the new Roman Empire at its peak - better than Ridleys Scott's Gladiator: a real, captive barbarian emperor, paraded on the Circus Maximus of world television. The barbarian was not a valiant warrior - but a bum. He was not hiding in a nuclear-proof bunker armed to his teeth - he was caught like "a rat" in a "spider hole". He was nothing but a pathetic ghost taking a medical for the world to see. What the bluish pictures did not show, though, is that former US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) asset Saddam Hussein is a reader of the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. An Arabic copy of Crime and Punishment was found in a shack near the "spider hole" where he was captured.

Saddam surely now know very well what he needs to do. He won't be consumed with remorse like Dostoevsky's character Raskolnikov, who committed murder. For the moment Saddam may be "taking the Fifth" - in the words of an American interrogator, referring the the fifth amendment of the US constitution under which a person has the right to remain silent until charged in court. But Saddam will wait until he gets some rest, a very good lawyer, and then he will start talking.

Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) asset Saddam Hussein is - already was - totally beside the point. Only in the past few months have we learned the extent to which the Saddam system sub-contracted a great deal of decision-making to different Iraqi elite - from tribal sheikhs to businessmen and Sunni and Wahhabi religious leaders. They may originally have been cajoled by Saddam with carrots and sticks to be incorporated into the Ba'athist regime. But now they are totally free to command their own agendas.

To top it all, they really have a common agenda for the first time in their lives: a war against American occupation. The resistance will persist because Saddam was never its political, religious, spiritual or moral guide. The mukawama - resistance against foreign occupation - is now a full-blown nationalist, religious movement. The most popular political party on the sprawling campus of Baghdad University is not the widely-despised Ahmad CAzaelabi's neo-conservative-backed Iraqi National Congress. It is the Iraq Islamist Party.

Not that anyone in the RWAP is noticing - nor any of the democratic candidates for that matter. At least the RWAP has the excuse of wetting themselves with the prospect of GW Bush winning in a land slide due to the news over the last week - both economic and political.

In any event, Juan Cole has more on the whole Saddam/Bush/Rummy/Reagan/Abrams/Schultz affair.

Rumsfeld, Bechtel and Iraq

The document also reveals two other things on which the press hasn't widely remarked. George H. W. Bush was deeply involved in this Saddamist démarche, he was the one who extended an invitation to high Baathist official Tariq Aziz to come to Washington.

And, Schultz told both Rumsfeld and Saddam that the US was trying to curb weapons flows to Iran. Yet it is well known that Israel was supplying Iran with weaponry in return for Iranian oil. Only a little over a year later, Schultz double-crossed Saddam by getting on board with the Iran-Contra weapons exchange, which was suggested by the Israelis in the first place. The White House illegally sold Iran hundreds of powerful TOW anti-tank and HAWK anti-aircraft weapons [which Reagan came on television and told us were shoulder-launched weapons!], for use against Washington's newfound ally, the Iraqis, who were being assured that the US was trying hard to "prevent an Iranian victory . . ."

These weapons sales contravened US law, under which Iran was tagged as a terrorist nation. (Even today I can get into trouble for so much as editing a paper by an Iranian scholar for publication in a US scholarly journal, but it was all right for the Republicans and Neocons to send Khomeini 1000 TOWs!) Not only that, but Reagan's team then turned around and used the money garnered from these off-the-books sales to support the contra death squads in Nicaragua. In the US Constitution, how to spend government money is the purview of Congress, and Congress had told Reagan "no" on funding the death squads. So Reagan's people essentially stole weapons from the Pentagon storehouses, shipped them to Israel for transfer to Ayatollah Khomeini, and then took the ill gotten gains from fencing the stolen goods and gave them to nun-murderers in Latin America.

Steven has the handicapping of the democrats in the post Saddam capture world.

MUTE: File Sharing that Protects your Privacy

MUTE is a new file sharing network that uses virtual addresses (instead of IP addresses) and ant-inspired routing algorithms to protect the privacy of both downloaders and uploaders (in other words, defeat RIAA spy tactics). Version 0.1 was released today, with native builds for Linux, MacOSX, and Windows.

Then go read Shirky.

The RIAA Succeeds Where the Cypherpunks Failed

It may be time to dust off that old issue of Wired, because the RIAA is succeeding where 10 years of hectoring by the Cypherpunks failed. When shutting down Napster turned out to have all the containing effects of stomping on a tube of toothpaste, the RIAA switched to suing users directly. This strategy has worked much better than shutting down Napster did, convincing many users to stop using public file sharing systems, and to delete MP3s from their hard drives. However, to sue users, they had to serve a subpoena, and to do that, they had to get their identities from the user's internet service providers.

Identifying those users has had a second effect, and that's to create a real-world version of the scenario that drove the invention of user-controlled encryption in the first place. Whitfield Diffie, inventor of public key encryption, the strategy that underlies most of today's cryptographic products, saw the problem as a version of "Who will guard the guardians?"

Liberal Oasis has a good one on the whole brouhaha over Dean's comment that the US isn't any safer with the capture of Saddam.

If A Man With No WMD Is Put In Jail, Are We Any Safer?

I particularly like

But it looks to LiberalOasis that attacking Dean for essentially maintaining his original position only burnishes his rep as one who sticks to his guns no matter what’s the prevailing mood of the moment.

You can decide if that makes him more electable or not.

Okay, the title was a poor attempt at humor.

Wind energy not limited by technical barriers

Dutch research has demonstrated that there are no technical barriers to wind energy generating a significant part of the electricity supply. With the appropriate technical measures, possible problems in the electricity grid can be taken care of properly.
Researcher Han Slootweg developed simulation models, which demonstrate how wind energy affects the behaviour of electricity grids in concrete situations. These simulation models can also be used to establish the precise nature and size of any technical measures that might be required.

An initial analysis with the model revealed that there are no technical barriers to wind energy generating a significant part of the electricity supply. Technical measures are available to resolve any unexpected problems that arise. Research has shown that the measures chosen are strongly dependent on the type of wind turbine used and this must therefore be taken into account.

Slootweg first of all developed simulation models for different types of wind turbines. Then he developed models for complete wind parks, in which an entire wind park can be simulated at once. The input for the model consists of data from the type of wind turbine used in the park, the location of the individual turbines within the park and the wind speed.

These simulation models were used by Slootweg to investigate the effect of wind turbines on the behaviour of an electricity grid. To this end, he continually substituted some conventional generators with wind turbines, and then compared how different electricity networks responded to a number of events. For example, he investigated how the electricity grid responded to short circuits and changes in the amount of electricity generated due to generator failure.

The research has provided important insights into the consequences of connecting wind turbines to the electricity grid for the grid's stability. The behaviour of the electricity grid is to a large extent, determined by the power stations connected to it. Wind turbines differ from conventional power stations, which run on coal, natural gas or nuclear fission, in two fundamental aspects. Wind is the primary energy source of wind turbines and the wind cannot be controlled. Wind turbines also contain different types of generators. As a result of this, wind turbines have a very different effect on the electricity grid from that of conventional power stations.

Ouch.

Rumsfeld Visited Baghdad in 1984 to Reassure Iraqis, Documents Show
Trip Followed Criticism Of Chemical Arms' Use

Well, well, well.

Donald H. Rumsfeld went to Baghdad in March 1984 with instructions to deliver a private message about weapons of mass destruction: that the United States' public criticism of Iraq for using chemical weapons would not derail Washington's attempts to forge a better relationship, according to newly declassified documents.

Rumsfeld, then President Ronald Reagan's special Middle East envoy, was urged to tell Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz that the U.S. statement on chemical weapons, or CW, "was made strictly out of our strong opposition to the use of letAzael and incapacitating CW, wherever it occurs," according to a cable to Rumsfeld from then-Secretary of State George P. Shultz.

The statement, the cable said, was not intended to imply a shift in policy, and the U.S. desire "to improve bilateral relations, at a pace of Iraq's choosing," remained "undiminished." "This message bears reinforcing during your discussions."

The documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the nonprofit National Security Archive, provide new, behind-the-scenes details of U.S. efforts to court Iraq as an ally even as it used chemical weapons in its war with Iran.

An amusing email from one of Jim Treacher's fans.

Subject: It must be maddening

It is at least amuzing to see the effect some modest success (and that's all is is so far) driving the left into such a spin. Imagine if OBL is caught and some form of democracry (on the Turkish model perhaps) were to start in Iraq in 12-18 months.

You'll such just be much too funny to bear.....unlike now where you're attempts at humour are sadly lacking. It's Ok though, you can cry yourself to sleep at night knowing you're in the right. It's better than a mass grave and after all, people fought and died so you could be this clever.

Best of luck....it seems you'll have 5 more years of yucks to fire-off then maybe St. Hillary can save you.

Daniel Drezner gets mail.

On the one hand, it's refreshing to see that the competence argument has made its way into polite conversation on the right.

On the other hand, it's particularly funny to see the naked expression of those who would cry "democrat" or "Dean" at the expression of the opinion that the emperor may in fact have no clothes.

The Omnibus Spending Bill and the Budget Process

While everyone is focusing on the pork, the real problem is the serious breakdown in the budgetary process. Classic misdirection and reframing of the issue. Geesh.

The larger point is not the earmarks. The real reason we should care about this omnibus spending bill is because it represents a serious breakdown in the budget process for 2004. One problem is the lack of congressional oversight on the massive bill. Also of major concern is the lack of government accountability to citizens on how their tax dollars really get appropriated. Additionally, the minority party has not been privy to the discussions of compromise for the omnibus bill. In fact, balance of power has shifted to the executive branch, leaving compromises between the President and his party.

This process undermines the checks and balances built into our constitutional framework by giving the executive branch unusual powers. Our system requires the legislative branch to prescribe spending and the executive branch to dispose of the actions. However, under the omnibus bill, the executive branch gained the power to tell the legislative branch what it wants - using the threat of a veto and government shutdown. In this year's scenario, the President was even able to reverse legislative provisions that had already been agreed upon in both the House and the Senate. One example is the FCC media ownership rules. Both the House and the Senate rejected a FCC rule that allowed a company to own TV stations reaching 45 percent of the nation's viewers, rather than the previous standard of 35 percent. However, the President told key leaders that it must be 39 percent. Coincidentally (or not) this allows Viacom Inc., owner of CBS and UPN, and News Corp., owner of Fox, both of which exceeded the percent limit because of mergers, to avoid having to sell any of their TV stations.

Iraq: U.S. Troop Rotation

The Defense Department plans to reduce forces by rotating units out of Iraq without replacing them -- specifically the 82nd Airborne Division and the 173rd Separate Infantry Brigade. These units are in western Iraq, and their area of operations will be handed over to a smaller but as yet unidentified force likely consisting of National Guard units such as the 81st Armor Brigade (Washington and California), 39th Infantry Brigade (Arkansas) and the 30th Armor Brigade (New York, West Virginia and North Carolina). This will mean reduced proficiency in these areas as highly trained paratroopers are replaced with lesser-trained, and therefore less effective, National Guard units.

These forces' capabilities remain substantial: They will be capable, if needed, to project force beyond Iraq -- as long as the guerrilla threat is dealt with efficiently and insurgent activity remains strategically low-key. There are sufficient rotary wing aviation, armor and infantry fighting vehicles present to do so. Also, the Air Force maintains a presence at bases in Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain and the Navy is able to rapidly deploy up to four carrier groups at any time.

A key factor for a reduced U.S. presence in Iraq is the formulation of a viable Iraqi army and civil defense corps. So far, this process has proved much slower then initially anticipated. These indigenous units will dictate the nature and size of future U.S. force packages deployed to the region.

Nothing in the projected force package will speed or slow the foundation of indigenous defense forces in Iraq. On the contrary, Britain is sending an additional 1,000 military police to the region for the express purpose of training more Iraqis. For the foreseeable future, however, the United States will continue to rely almost exclusively upon its own forces for security and counterinsurgency operations.

Am I the only one disturbed by it? The kid just sits there, passively. The implication seems to be that one can passively "absorb" knowledge - i.e. that there is no active component required in learning. That you can just "pour" the knowledge into people. Top them off and send them on their way.

It just freaks me out whenever I watch it.

Case in point: Iraq.

How to explain the insanity? Lot's of those who consider themselves on the left side of the political spectrum wonder about this a lot. Conspiracy theories. Evil. Corporate greed. Alien colonization. The list is way too long to enumerate.

The easy answer to this complex issue:

Smart people believe weird stupid things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons

It's called the Confirmation Bias.

Echoing Bliffle in the comments, Paga (Latino Pundit)sent me this article regarding the downsides of outsourcing. I must say that relying on the downside to save the system is a dead end. Still...

Outsourcing overseas has downsides, U.S. execs say

Umang Gupta, chief executive of Keynote Systems Inc., says he has no plans to join the popular trend of shifting operations to his native India to save money.

Even though most other U.S. technology companies are eyeing low-cost offshore centers as a way to boost profits, he said the problems presented by the south Asian country are not worth the benefits -- given his company's large computer networks.

"Data center involves sophisticated work and needs a reliable network," he said. "The infrastructure in India is not good enough; it has constant power outages."

The Campaign of Hate and Fear

Drawing on my vast fictional experience matters military, my vast fictional credentials as a Democrat and my laughably fictional interpretation and analysis of history and current events, I conclude that while not all Democrats may be traitors, their leaders certainly are - and always have been.

Wal-Mart reports subdued US sales

Wal-Mart dampened hopes for strong holiday sales as it announced expectations that US December same-store sales growth would be at the low end of a 3-5 per cent growth forecast.

In a weekly sales summary, the world's largest retailer said more consumers were delaying holiday shopping and buying gift cards, which are not recorded as revenue when purchased.

Richard Hastings, analyst at Bernard Sands, said: "Wal-Mart shoppers are a huge aggregation of American society. The sales reflect that there are a lot of households insufficiently funded for the future," said Mr Hastings. "If you're an observer, you need to be very worried about this."

Wal-Mart said that a decline in traffic reflected a consumer trend to shop later in the month. Sales were strongest in the south-east and mid-Atlantic regions.

Wal-Mart accounts for about 8 per cent of US retail sales, excluding cars, making it an important barometer of consumer behaviour.

Last month the company sounded yet another cautious note on the strength of the recovery in US consumer spending. It indicated that fourth-quarter and full-year earnings might come in below analyst forecasts.

Wal-Mart narrowly missed Wall Street third-quarter earnings per share forecasts, for the first time in eight years. Analysts said the miss, by a fraction of a cent, was essentially a "rounding error".

Wal-Mart said the strongest categories were basics such as food, pharmacy and infants' goods. Wal-Mart shares dipped more than 3 per cent to $50.74 at the close.

Mathematics could stabilize peace treaties

A political scientist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico has devised a mathematical method that could help civil-war negotiators to find the most stable peace treaties1.

Elisabeth Wood calculates that a settlement will be stronger and more likely to last if it finds the ideal way to apportion the stakes. For example, if two warring factions each want control of some part of a disputed region, negotiators need to divide the territory in a way that comes closest to satisfying them both.

This doesn't guarantee that neither party will fight on in the hope of gaining more. But it may lead them to decide that further fighting will not substantially improve the eventual outcome.

Wood hopes that her technique could provide a general framework for resolving civil conflicts over power, land or other resources fairly and transparently. At present, dispute is addressed ad hoc. She reckons that her mathematical model offers a way to make progress even if the stakes of the conflict are less obviously divisible.

Light cone RSS feed

<heh>

Get RSS notification of stars that enter your light cone.

Currently, I have 85 stars under my evil influence. In a short three weeks, the star HR651 will join my subversive cohort.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. (cue Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor)

IBM to Export Highly Paid Jobs to India, China

In one of the largest moves to "offshore" highly paid U.S. software jobs, International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM - News) has told its managers to plan on moving the work of as many as 4,730 programmers to India, China and elsewhere, Monday's Wall Street Journal reported.

The unannounced plan, outlined in company documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal, would replace thousands of workers at IBM facilities in Southbury, Conn., Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Raleigh, N.C., Dallas, Boulder, Colo., and elsewhere in the U.S.Already, the managers have been told, IBM has hired 500 engineers in India to take on some of the work that will be moved.

IBM calls its plan, first presented internally to some midlevel managers in October, "Global Sourcing." It involves people in its Application Management Services group, a part of IBM's giant global-services operations, which comprise more than Azaelf IBM's 315,000 employees.

IBM's plan, still under development, will take place over a number of months in stages. About 947 people are scheduled to be notified during the first Azaelf of the coming year that their work will be handled overseas in the future. It isn't yet clear how many of the other 3,700 jobs identified as "potential to move offshore" in the IBM documents will move next year or some time later.

However, the fate of some of the targeted jobs isn't certain: IBM managers still haven't figured out whether all of the work the jobs represent can be performed just as well abroad. The jobs involve updating and improving software for IBM's own business operations.

Some workers are scheduled to be informed of the plan for their jobs by the end of January. After that they will be expected to train an overseas replacement worker in the U.S. for several weeks. The IBM workers marked for replacement have 60 days to find another job inside the company, likely to be a difficult task at a time when IBM is holding down hiring.

IBM declined to comment on what it called "internal presentations."

ESlate security gaps tallied

The analysis, conducted for the Ohio secretary of state, of Hart InterCivic and three other vendors' systems found 57 potential security problems. Hart InterCivic, Harris County's eSlate vendor, had 10 potential risk areas, including four rated as high.

"We believe because of weaknesses we found in all of these systems, the vendors need to go back and take care of the weaknesses," said Glenn Newkirk, president of InfoSentry, one of two firms hired to conduct the review.

[...]

Researchers from InfoSentry, of Raleigh, N.C., and Detroit-based Compuware Corp. reviewed Hart InterCivic, Diebold Election Systems, Election Systems and Software and Sequoia Voting Systems. The six-week review was prompted after security concerns were raised in Ohio and elsewhere.

The review found, among other things, the potential for an unauthorized person to gain access to eSlate's supervisory controls and shut down the polls early. A password is required to shut down the system here. Hart InterCivic contends that if the system were shut down, voting data would not be lost.

The report also notes that eSlate lacks encryption to protect voting data, and Hart InterCivic is now considering the change.

Another risk identified in the report is that the connection between the system's units can be accessed by voters and disconnected. More security would alleviate the risk, the report states.

Results in which security breaches failed include: an unsuccessful attempt to access the system from an external source, failure to load a program through external sources and failure to upload results twice.

"Compuware has identified several significant security issues," the report states of the eSlate system, "which left unmitigated would provide an opportunity for an attacker to disrupt the election process or throw the election results into question."

Sorry to be repetitious, I've blogged about this before (thanks to Dave Neiwert), but I've just recently found a NY Times op ed piece regarding the issue of domestic terrorism.

Not to throw a wet blanket on the whole capture of Saddam, but here we have cases of REAL terrorists with REAL WMD on U.S. soil - while Saddam was living in a rat hole looking like a drunken hobo clutching a suitcase full of cash. . . What was that about dealing with the wolf in the cart as opposed to the wolves at the edge of the meadow? Naw... Too hard. Doesn't win elections.

Pity.

Update: of course, Dave has much more on this. . .

Our Enemies at Home

In April, as Baghdad fell and American soldiers began searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, federal officials uncovered a cache of deadly chemicals much closer to home — in the eastern Texas town of Noonday. The stockpile included a fully functional sodium cyanide bomb capable of killing hundreds, as well as neo-Nazi and antigovernment literature, illegal weapons, Azaelf a million rounds of ammunition, and more than 100 explosives, including bombs disguised as suitcases.

Wish yesterday was a bit more sunny for this shot of the beach of the Pololu valley, but. . . This is a stunning valley and coastline. This photograph doesn't do it justice at all. Anyways, enjoy. (click on the picture for the full size version).

Hackers Steal From Pirates, to No Good End

The people who design rogue programs that take over computers from afar are now applying the tactic that made music pirating programs so effective - and the Internet may never be the same.

The rogue programs, known generically as "Trojan horses," have enabled pornographers and others to mask their identities by using unwitting people's computers as relay stations. It had been assumed that diligent investigators could ultimately shut down a system by identifying the server computer used as the initial launching pad. But now a researcher has determined that a new kind of Trojan horse could make the systems virtually unstoppable.

Joe Stewart, a computer expert at the LURHQ Corporation, a security company based in Chicago, said that he discovered this new phase in the evolution of Trojan horse programs while taking apart a program called Backdoor.Sinit, which has been circulating on the Internet since late September.

Sinit, Mr. Stewart said, does something unexpected: it uses the commandeered machines to form a peer-to-peer network like the popular Kazaa program used to trade music files. Each machine on the network can share resources and provide information to the others without being controlled by a central server machine.

"It's like Kazaa only without all the pesky copyrighted files," Mr. Stewart said. And, as the music industry has discovered, when there is no central machine, "these tactics make it impossible to shut down," he said.

The Capture of Saddam Hussein

Under any circumstances, this is a massive psychological blow to the guerrillas -- and guerrilla war depends heavily upon psychological factors. The capture increases the credibility of the United States dramatically and raises doubts about the viability of the guerrillas. There is no downside to the United States on this one -- save for inevitable criticisms as to whether he was treated humanely, which will start coming out of Europe in a matter of days.

What to do with him is an interesting question. Following interrogation, he will be tried. He could be tried in Iraq, although the outcome there is uncertain, and the internal pressures could be substantial. An interesting choice would be to try him at The Hague. What makes that important is that, in spite of being an organ of the United Nations, the international war crimes tribunal is a heavily European institution in many respects. Sending him to The Hague would force the Europeans to take primary responsibility for judging Hussein. In so doing, it could shift European public opinion and the view of national governments.

U.S. President George W. Bush certainly needed this capture from a political standpoint. The vision of helplessness that had plagued U.S. policy in Iraq can be reversed by this action, assuming that any guerrilla counterattack is managed effectively and explained publicly. In any event, Bush will now be able to claim that in spite of his critics, he has quietly been pursuing the war and that the effectiveness of this strategy is now showing itself.

This might not have been a decisive day for the United States in the war, but it was not a trivial day. Indeed, it is reasonable to argue that this is the most important event since the end of major combat activities was announced. We will now find out what the guerrillas are made of -- and whatever the answer, that will be the most important piece of intelligence available. Good, bad or indifferent, U.S. leaders have got to know how resilient the guerrillas are. And they are about to find out.

Matt Stoller has the best post I've read today regarding the news of Saddam's capture.

To call this the 'democratization' of warfare, where any voice matters simply because it helps shape the narrative, is somewhat inhumane. But the rapid media cycle, which dicates decisions about where to deploy massive resources, has taken on added importance, and if you can penetrate the narrative, you can become an actor in modern warfare. The globalization of the media apparatus has destroyed Vandenberg's implicit assumption that the politics of war and domestic politics can be separate. War is now everywhere there is a voice about the war, and battles are only the most violent and hurtful symbols of conflict.

Warbloggers like Instapundit, Citizen Smash, and Jeff Jarvis self-consciously pursue this dynamic in a way that left-leaning opinion shapers don't. They think they are 'at war', whereas liberals don't. Howard Dean can talk all he wants about the excellent progress shown by the capture of Saddam Hussein, but Joe Lieberman's vicious attack on how a Dean Presidency would mean Saddam would be in 'power not prison' suggests that Dean's community network is still pretty much helpless in the short term before a symbolic onslaught of the broadcast community. Dean hasn't set up a narrative that allows for a prudent approach to the use of force, and so he and liberal bloggers can't do anything to combat the clear framing going on right now that the Iraq war was the right thing to do.

Well, let them. More to say later, but for now let's just celibrate the fact that the mangy dog has been captured.

Excellent news. Let's hope it translates into something beyond the capture of an icon.

Look, I want a booming economy far more than I want an election issue. Lord knows I'm not an economist and I don't even play one on TV. But the latest chest thumping by the RWAP about super rosy predictions for 2004 has got me rather worried - something about the other predictions of theirs and the realities just causes me to shudder whenever they start crowing.

U.S. growth seen about 3 pct in 2004-UCLA forecast

The U.S. economy will grow modestly next year, keeping the unemployment rate stuck near 6 percent and the Federal Reserve on hold as it watches for any inflationary pressure from a weaker dollar, according to a closely watched forecast released on Thursday.

Edward Leamer, the director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast and one of the first economists to flag the most recent recession, said the sustained surge in U.S. growth next year that some Wall Street analysts expect will not emerge.

Instead, the economy will grow at a rate of 2.5 percent to 3 percent in 2004, rather than the 4.5 percent to 5 percent pace typical of normal rebounds from recession, Leamer said.

That slower growth, the result in part of the pressure on household balance sheets and local government budgets, will not do much to lower the unemployment rate, he added.

"We should get about a 1 million new jobs over the next year. But the unemployment rate sticks around the 6 percent level," Leamer said, adding that will give the Federal Reserve reason to keep interest rates down.

Unless the job market substantially improves or the falling value of the dollar raises inflation, the Fed will hold steady the federal funds target rate, the main short-term rate the Fed uses to influence the economy, Leamer said.

The Fed's policy-makers voted unanimously on Tuesday to hold the federal funds rate at 1 percent, its lowest level since 1958. The Fed also vowed to keep borrowing costs down for "a considerable period."

'TWILIGHT ZONE' ECONOMY

Leamer noted that a number of factors are making the outlook for the U.S. economy hazy and difficult to forecast.

Higher productivity made the third quarter "feel like a Twilight Zone episode" as a blistering 8.2 percent rise in the economy was paired with a weak job market, Leamer said.

"The data are so unusual with all that economic growth and no employment," Leamer said. "It's some kind of mysterious force out there delivering products to our door."

For instance, there is reason to expect a pullback in spending by consumers as well as state and local governments will emerge as drags on the economy, Leamer said.

Consumers have bought enough cars and houses to last for some time, and they "need to begin to repair their own troubled balance sheets," Leamer said.

Meanwhile, productivity gains of recent years and stimulus from tax cuts may run their course next year, he said.

Software Development and Usability

The thing is, I think one of the reasons that Movable Type is so popular is because the product combines element from both Mena and me. And I don't know if it's a female-male combination or if it's just the combination of our personalities, and frankly it really doesn't matter. But of the articles that do focus on us, I'm still waiting for the article that goes beyond "they're so cute" or "Ben created Movable Type", and tries to get at something core to software development: what factors contribute to creating a great product?

The programmer was approached by the user and she presented her requirements. The programmer regaled her with tales of how the computer was a general purpose machine that could literally do anything she wanted. Anything at all.

"I don't want it to do anything", the user said, "I want it to do something very particular. Something very precise."

There are none so blind as those who cannot see. . .

Not that it's going to matter to the RWAP, but one more time (with feeling)

Iraqi Agent Denies He Met 9/11 Hijacker in Prague Before Attacks on the U.S.

A former Iraqi intelligence officer who was said to have met with the suspected leader of the Sept. 11 attacks has told American interrogators the meeting never happened, according to United States officials familiar with classified intelligence reports on the matter.

Ahmad KAzaelil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, the former intelligence officer, was taken into custody by the United States in July. Under questioning he has said that he did not meet with Mohamed Atta in Prague, according to the officials, who have reviewed classified debriefing reports based on the interrogations.

Morons. (and I do mean that in the colloquial sense of the term)

Laputan Logic*

Thanks to Dr. G for this link. Give it a read.

Here's an email I received from one of my friends that is pretty terrifying. Reprinted here with his permission.

When I returned from Tahiti, I had two mosquito bites on my left leg which I figured would heal up like regular mosquito bites. However, within 48 hours of arriving back from Tahiti, I started having fevers and one of the bites turned into a open sore about the size of a pencil top, with a inch or so of redness around it. I dismissed it thinking I must have scratched it open in my sleep, but by Sunday when the sore was growing in size, and the fevers getting worse, I realized I needed a doctor. The next morning, I made an emergency appointment with my PPO doc to see what he thought. All 7 doctors working in the clinic that day looked at my leg and then decided that I needed to be in hospital. Immediately. Turns out Stanford University Hospital was the nearest hospital that has a tropical disease specialty, so thats where they sent me. "Go straight to the top of the admitting line, they are waiting for you". From walking in the door to being in a bed with a prearranged doctor at the bedside was 20 minutes.

Quagmire is so 20th century. Josh MarsAzaell provides the image for what I've been thinking about all this brouhaha over the contracts.

We're like the Saber-toothed Tiger sinking into the tar pit. And over on dry land are a few giraffes munching away on some leaves. And we're taunting them with what terms we're going to give them to buy into the good thing we've got going on.

Yes, an over-dramatic metaphor. But you get the idea.

What a bunch of whiners!!! I'm talking about democrats. I've never seen such a bunch of children - such a bunch of people more willing to fight between themselves than to fight the actual enemy.

If we lose in 2004, it's going to be because of us - not because of republicans. We are the only people who can lose this thing. The republicans are handing us issue after issue after issue. Heck, the Governator of California is bending over backwards to hand us a couple.

So what's the problem? Are we all a bunch of wimps? Are we all just a bunch of people who are so ready to bitch slap each other because we have "principles" that we have to uphold?

C'mon people. I'm getting quite sick and tired of this. People will not vote for a party that is unable to vote for itself.

George Bush is unelectable. Again, the only reason he'll win is if we keep acting like whipped puppies and let them. Get involved. Get off of your ass and get to work. Get informed. Get angry. Get busy.

It ain't going to be handed to us if we are too busy eating each other alive.

In my opinion, George Bush is unelectable.

Just adding a microgram or two to the effort. It's amusing, nothing more.

Via TalkLeft. .

Coalition: Nearly Azaelf of Iraqi army has quit

About 300 of 700 members of the new Iraqi army have resigned, citing unhappiness with terms, conditions and pay and with instructions of commanding officers, a representative of the U.S.-led coalition said Thursday.

"It's a new force, and ... we face some difficulties," the representative said.

In response to the resignations, the coalition will review the terms and conditions and compare them with other security services in Iraq -- the police and Civil Defense Corps, the representative said.

So I went searching back through the old news I could find, and low and behold this has always been about the number. Where did that 100K number come from that I remember? It was the Iraqi police force. . . And the number is around 85K, not 100K as I seemed to remember.

Since we're planning on handing over Iraq sometime next year, it seems rather bizarre that we only have 500 or so soldiers in their military. Not to mention that we can't seem to keep them employed.

This plan is doomed.

Excellent.

I never quite understand why the pro-war crowd, left and right, seem to think that injecting the phrase "Bush is a moron" into the debate is in some way unsportsmanlike, unmannerly or evidence that one's opposition is partisan or not serious. It's an entirely germane point in considering the costs and benefits of a war whether or not it's being run by a moron, and it is by no means established that the option of a war not run by a moron was completely out of the question.

Sorry. I just watched "A few good men" the other day, and that line just keeps sticking in my mind. . .

Secretary to Leave Before Drug Benefit Begins. Get out while the getting is good. Plenty of jobs waiting for him, no doubt.

Most Federal Agencies Flunk Internet Security. Again, your Homeland Security dollars hard at work.

Putin Is Free To Manage Capitalism. I think I can see into Putin's soul, and it's nothing like what Bush saw.

No Iraq contracts for war foes Guess that's going to make Jim Baker's job so much more easier to do, right? Of course, what this really means is that the Administration has finally gone off the deep end: Clear as Mud.

US Plans Massive Rotation of Troops. Ah yes. 250,000 troops will be flying through the air on commercial jet liners with absolutely no protection against missiles and such. Sets my teeth on edge thinking about it. Not to mention that we're shuttling out the very people who are now immersed in and familiar with the environment and sending in a bunch of people who have no idea what the heck is going on. I'm sure everything will be "just fine".

Don't let critics fool you; Medicare plan a winner. Surprise. He's a republican.

How Dean Could Win. Bill Kristol comes out for Dean. Hey Dean Esmay, the Clue Train is leaving and you don't even have your bags packed yet.

Our own private Palestine. Yes, Iraq is nothing like Palestine. It is so much not like Palestine that we're going to start using Israeli tactics in order to keep the place under control. US Using Israeli Military to Train Special Ops to fight Iraqis: "I have a sinking feeling that Bush just lost the war on terror."

Well, the Administration is certainly winning hearts and minds by doing a bit of Union Busting: US occupation forces raid Iraqi union headquarters. Boy, you can just hear the wheels grinding in this Administration's collective heads: "Hey, if we had martial law over here, we wouldn't have any problems with Unions at all!".

American soldiers ransacked and destroyed the IFTU's possessions, tearing down banners and posters condemning acts of terror, tarnishing the name of the IFTU and that of the General Union of Transport Workers (on the building's main front) with black paint and smashing windows glass, without giving any reason or explanation.

And then we have Cowards. Yep. Cowards. Dave Neiwert has a great bit about a gem of a comment in Oliver Willis' blog entry on the rather nasty and disturbing letter that appeared recently in a newspaper. It's in response to the coward Misha of the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler. JR had this to say

So I have this to say to the Misha's of the world: Try it, fuckhead. Just try it. Fuck with me or my folks and you will get hurt. Bad. I won't start this fight. But I will finish it. There will be others with me. Unlike you, we won't start this kind of shit. We will not threaten to strangle you for your speech. But do not confuse our desire for peace with credulity, weakness or cowardice.

Tom Friedman, violent? Say it ain't so. . .

I run over to the stage to catch Tom Friedman for that question-and-answer he promised I'd get after his speech. Harvey Schwartz, a Manhattan lawyer, greets Friedman and with a smile on his face tells him he learned two things from Friedman that night: That the columnist, "Supports drilling in ANWR," and is, "willing to sacrifice Israel on the altar of Iraq."

Friedman yells "F**k you," hits the guy with his right hand, and then shoves him into a small crowd of people with their backs turned. Schwartz has a good foot and 100 pounds on the diminutive Friedman, but he went about three feet backwards from Friedman's push.

Friedman turns around and sees me with my notebook and tape recorder. Deer in the headlights. Schwartz goes, "Did you get a picture of that?" Still under the lull of the truth is untrue/up is down nature of the event, I consider for a moment whether I'm a photographer. Friedman runs over to an IPF executive, the one who said he does "the most unbelievably insightful reporting ever," (sans an adjective) to tell on Schwartz. Like those wimpy nerds in grade school, he hits first, tattles second, screaming about "that asshole," who apparently is so mean that his innocuous comment deserves a whack.

Finally, I have Friedman cornered. Can he answer some questions? "No, no." But I've got one question I think he'll have a cool answer to: What do you think your role is for the Geneva Accord? "I'm a journalist, I'm a columnist," he says and then runs away. Sure, he is those things, but only in the loosest sense: more, he's an actor, a trader, and a fighter.

The man who spent the past few hours pronouncing how we need to see past the present, the rhetoric, and the attacks to achieve peace has just gone violent on some random guy.

In science news, a major break through: Rice engineers make first pure nanotube fibers

Researchers at Rice University have discovered how to create continuous fibers of out of pristine single-walled carbon nanotubes. The process, which is similar to the one used to make Kevlar® on an industrial scale, offers the first real hope of making threads, cables and sheets of pure carbon nanotubes (SWNTs).
. . .
Scientists estimate nanotubes are about 100 times stronger than steel at one-sixth the weight. By comparison, Kevlar® -- the fiber used in bulletproof body armor -- is about five times stronger than an equal weight of steel. So far, no large-scale objects have been made of pure nanotubes due to a lack of processing methods that are viable on an industrial scale.

In honor of Arnold Schwarzenegger's election to Governor of California, we now have the ability to implant false memories. I think I can now clearly see Karl Rove's 2004 election strategy. 'We can implant entirely false memories'

Kurt Gödel beware: Full-Circle 360° Camera Module

Until now, taking a 360° panorama with a normal lens has required taking multiple shots while rotating the camera slowly and then combining ("stitching") those shots together to form the panorama. In contrast, the 360° full-circle lens allows the full 360° surroundings of the camera to be imaged at the same time with a single lens.
Sony has now developed a camera module that uses this 360° full-circle lens, and is releasing as commercial products both a camera module that uses a 380K-pixel, 30 fps CCD that outputs a ring-shaped image as a composite video signal as well as a high-resolution camera module that uses a 1.28 MP, 7.5 fps CCD with a built-in panorama expansion processing function.

Well, that's enough truth. . . Off to the beach...

Aloha.

David Frum is a moron.

Toady. Bootlicker. Tank wipe.

Oh, and Hellblazer is proud to have the highest ranking on the search phrase: "David Frum Moron".

Not quite as funny as the "miserable failure" Google hack, but still amusing to me.

Just love the headlines:

Governor won't probe allegations after all - apparently, he's already done enough "probing"

Dow Hits 10000 , Falls Back Down

Your homeland bio security at work: WHO: Flu Vaccine Shortage Only in US

The World Health Organization said Tuesday that it is aware of reports of flu vaccine running out in areas of the United States, but said supplies appear to be adequate around the world.

Speaking of hitting something and falling down, Democrats decry Republican tactics in marathon vote. Guys, get a clue. This is about the 80 gazillionth time you've been rolled. You'd have thought you would have learned by now.

More from the "thought you would have learned by now" department, MOVING TARGETS

The Bush Administration has authorized a major escalation of the Special Forces covert war in Iraq. In interviews over the past month, American officials and former officials said that the main target was a hard-core group of Baathists who are believed to be behind much of the underground insurgency against the soldiers of the United States and its allies. A new Special Forces group, designated Task Force 121, has been assembled from Army Delta Force members, Navy seals, and C.I.A. paramilitary operatives, with many additional personnel ordered to report by January. Its highest priority is the neutralization of the Baathist insurgents, by capture or assassination.

The revitalized Special Forces mission is a policy victory for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has struggled for two years to get the military leadership to accept the strategy of what he calls “Manhunts”—a phrase that he has used both publicly and in internal Pentagon communications. Rumsfeld has had to change much of the Pentagon’s leadership to get his way. “Knocking off two regimes allows us to do extraordinary things,” a Pentagon adviser told me, referring to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Hey, how about that war on terrorism? Apparently, everything going as planned. Unfortunately, not our plan. . .Jihad has worked - the world is now split in two

Bin Laden's September 11 attacks are mainly to blame for this polarisation. But the responses of George Bush have exacerbated this, with his two wars and the failure to tackle the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Two years after the occupation of Afghanistan, US control is patchy. Outside cities, travel is risky, and even within them, life can be dangerous, as the Kandahar bombing demonstrated. The Taliban have regrouped and are returning in strength.

Perhaps the war on Afghanistan was necessary - but the war on Iraq was not. There was no link between Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden. The US is fighting on two fronts, in control of neither country. Much of the resistance in Iraq to the US is from Saddam loyalists or criminal or tribal groups. But the US and British claim there are also elements of al-Qaida...

Stop the Presses! Bush's Pork Barrel Overflows. Truly, there are no fiscal conservatives left in the Republican party. None. Nada. Zip. They're all hypocrites.

And you just have to love those SUV tax breaks

Thanks to provisions in President Bush's tax-cut package of last May, anyone with a plausible claim to business purpose can deduct the full cost of eligible SUVs and trucks. ..

To qualify for this treatment, the vehicle has to weigh at least 6,000 pounds, fully loaded. Roughly three dozen models clear that bar, including the iconically oversized Ford Expedition, GMC Yukon, Lincoln Navigator, Cadillac Escalade, Dodge Durango and, of course, the Hummer and Hummer H2.

A purchaser paying the maximum tax rate can save a bundle -- almost $19,000 off a $54,000 Escalade, for example. That creates a powerful incentive for buyers to choose the biggest, heaviest and most gas-guzzling models, which were selling quite well without any help, over more modest SUVs or even sedans…

And so the biggest SUVs acquired yet another undeserved advantage over other vehicles -- including those that are actually used for business purposes. A self-employed consultant or small-business owner who buys a sedan or minivan or under-three-ton truck this year can write off only a little over $10,000, and has to spread the deduction over five years.

Yes, Bush is truly an environmental president.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, it seems that little Joe and Hoss are in big trouble. Voting-Machine Makers To Fight Security Criticism. Nice to see unity among even the slime.

Speaking the obvious, A War of Choice or of Necessity?

Eight months after the Bush administration got us involved in a bloody war in Iraq, we are now told by one of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's closest advisers that Iraq was a war of choice after all. According to Richard Haass, director of policy planning at the State Department until June 2003 and still the Bush administration's special envoy to Northern Ireland, the administration "did not have to go to war against Iraq, certainly not when we did. There were other options" [op-ed, Nov. 23 ]. Really?

This is not what the administration told us before the war and continues to tell us to this day. On March 20, as he was sending troops into Iraq because the regime of Saddam Hussein allegedly possessed weapons of mass destruction and had ties to al Qaeda, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld told them, "We are at the point at which the risk of not acting is too great to wait longer. As you prepare, know that this war is necessary . . ." Some three weeks into the war, Powell, who had made the case for war to the United Nations, stated: "We do not seek war. We do not look for war. We don't want wars. But we will not be afraid to fight when these wars are necessary to protect the American people, to protect our interests, to protect friends."

Finally, it's good to see the right wake up and smell the coffee... A Troubling Influence

It is with a heavy heart therefore, that I am posting this article, which is the most complete documentation extant of Grover Norquist’s activities in beAzaelf of the Islamist Fifth Column. I have confronted Grover about these issues and have talked to others who have done likewise. But it has been left to Frank Gaffney and a few others, including Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson, to make the case and to suffer the inevitable recriminations that have followed earlier disclosures of some aspects of this story.

Up to now, the controversy over these charges has been dismissed or swept under the rug, as a clash of personalities or the product of one of those intra-bureaucratic feuds so familiar to the Washington scene. Unfortunately, this is wishful thinking. The reality is much more serious. No one reading this document to its bitter end will confuse its claims and confirming evidence with those of a political cat fight. On the basis of the evidence assembled here, it seems beyond dispute that Grover Norquist has formed alliances with prominent Islamic radicals who have ties to the Saudis and to Libya and to Palestine Islamic Jihad, and who are now under indictment by U.S. authorities. Equally troubling is that the arrests of these individuals and their exposure as agents of terrorism have not resulted in noticeable second thoughts on Grover’s part or any meaningful effort to dissociate himself from his unsavory friends.

There's a lot of flack about this, and all I'll really say about it is just quote Daniel Ellsberg on the subject of "conflict of interest" and the Iraq war from a talk he gave at the Commonwealth club of California.

Bronstein: Is Bush's Iraq policy a matter of conscience or a matter of ego? You have written about the oil issue.

Ellsberg: Are they doing what they think is best? Yes. Is Bush acting on his conscience? No doubt. 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."

When George Bush says, I will decide or I have not decided whether we go to war, not only do his subordinates not get up and say, Uh boss, you don't get to decide that, but too few journalists, too few people have said, the Constitution matters here.

The 2-Percent Illusion, via Oliver Willis

Miller isn't. He projects his own concern for the common good onto the Republicans. He can't quite seem to comprehend what the right is up to. Miller reports that his interviews "with conservative thinkers and activists left me stumped. Most of them insisted they were as concerned with equal opportunity and the problems of disadvantaged Americans as were Democrats, and resented the way their party was caricatured as heartless or indifferent." Miller offers several hypotheses to explain this apparent puzzle of seeming Republican indifference to social justice. In the end he concludes that the right is suffering from, of all things, "cognitive dissonance." Evidently they really do care about the poor; they just don't grasp that their program screws the poor.

Earth to Miller: Forget cognitive dissonance and remember Occam's razor. There is a much simpler and more plausible explanation: They really don't care about the poor. The right is absolutely sincere in its loathing of government and its belief that, in George Gilder's immortal words, "The poor, most of all, need the spur of their own poverty." The right blends ideology with opportunism when it guts regulation and cuts taxes in order to deliver for its elite political base.

Dennis Kucinich, a high profile Democrat? My, it seems that his ad has hit a nerve, hasn't it?

Governor, You're No George McGovern. Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha! It's going to be a hoot when he rips off his radical lefty mask during the campaign.

Has Dean mortgaged his future to his far-left supporters? Doubtful. Liberals' enthusiasm for Dean is not necessarily the same thing as Dean's enthusiasm for liberals. He governed as a moderate in Vermont, and his two decades in politics mark him as a centrist, a fact with which he would ceaselessly regale his audiences beginning the day after winning the nomination. Even if he has "drunk the Kool-Aid of his own campaign" (as one political observer put it), he will have plenty of time to swallow the centrist antidote next year. Most voters, apart from fierce Democratic partisans, will not tune in until then.

As for those fierce Democratic partisans, they will tolerate any kind of repositioning in order to defeat Bush. In the heat of battle, all that will matter will be Dean's status as Our Side's Guy. The passion and loyalty that Dean is building on the left today will not so much tie him down as free him up, securing the same sort of trusting base, and therefore the same sort of license to shift toward the center, that Ronald Reagan enjoyed in 1980.

In my Thanksgiving dinner straw poll, no individual Democratic contender had made much of an impression. But our conversation confirmed that if they hope to take back West Virginia and the White House, the Democrats need a nominee who can appeal to the angry left and the exasperated middle. Pass the mashed potatoes. Hello, Howard Dean.

That’s not just the tryptophan talking. Some Republicans are saying the same thing. In a convincing strategy memo titled “Why Dean Can Win,” Oregon-based political consultants Hans Kaiser and Bob Moore warn their GOP colleagues not to underestimate the Vermont governor: “We are whistling past the graveyard if we think Howard Dean will be a pushover.”

Kaiser and Moore recognize that Dean projects an authenticity that other high-profile Democrats—including Al Gore and Hillary Clinton —all lack. “The difference between Howard Dean and the rest of the Democrat candidates is that Dean comes across as a true believer to the base, but he will not appear threatening to folks in the middle,” they wrote in September. “More than any other candidate in the field, he will be able to present himself as one who cares about people (doctor), who balances budgets (governor), and who appears well grounded while looking presidential.”

Keep saying it, guys. Love it when an enemy is fighting what doesn't exist.

Then there's this great little bit from Newsweek, Exclusive: Cheney and the ‘Raw’ Intelligence

THE MEMO, obtained by NEWSWEEK, suggests that the INC last year was directly feeding intelligence reports about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and purported ties to terrorism to one of Cheney’s top foreign- policy aides. Cheney staffers later pushed INC info—including defectors’ claims about WMD and terror ties—to bolster the case that Saddam’s government posed a direct threat to America. But the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have strongly questioned the reliability of defectors supplied by the INC.

For months, Cheney’s office has denied that the veep bypassed U.S. intelligence agencies to get intel reports from the INC. But a June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney’s staff, as one of two “U.S. governmental recipients” for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. Under the program, “defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed”; the info was then reported to, among others, “appropriate governmental, non-governmental and international agencies.” The memo not only describes Cheney aide Hannah as a “principal point of contact” for the program, it even provides his direct White House telephone number. The only other U.S. official named as directly receiving the INC intel is William Luti, a former military adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who, after working on Cheney’s staff early in the Bush administration, shifted to the Pentagon, where he oversaw a secretive Iraq war-planning unit called the Office of Special Plans.

And speaking of Conspiracy Theories, it seems some libertarians have odd questions. . . Question of the Week: Reset Button

I was recently discussing with someone the concept of the Second Amendment as the government's reset button. Ultimately a major reason it exists is so the populace cannot be prevented from being armed, or easily disarmed through registration or excess regulation for that matter, in case we must ever take back the government and start again if it gets out of hand or something akin to a coup happens and the impostors must be reckoned with.

It says that the government provides for the national defense, but we retain the right to self-defense, and to keep and bear the tools needed for that, including defense against the government if it ever turns its might inward or ceases to represent us at all. It's not a separate entity, after all. It's us. If it ceases to be us, it ceases to be in our control, it needs to be taken back into the fold.

Do you think this will ever be needed? In the next fifty years? Do you think it will still be possible after another fifty years of those who want as much power, and helplessness of the populace against it as much as possible, chipping away at or disregarding our ability to reset things back to sanity? How about contrarians; do you think the reset interpretation is erroneous or, even if not, will never be needed?

And finally, Is W Running Out of Ammo?

So what's left? Bush is likely to push for "savings accounts" that will disproportionately benefit the wealthy and which will have huge budget ramifications but not during the first 10 years. Here, maybe, just maybe, the media will have caught on to the Bush budget games and call it fairly rather than blather on uncritically (the way say, a typical Richard Stevenson New York Times article does).

More likely, I've got a feeling that we might be back to looking at silly wedge issues designed to divide the electorate e.g. gay marriage and any other "Willie Horton" issue Karl Rove can dredge up if he can ever break into Dean's Vermont records. The hope is that with the life and death issues of Iraq and 9/11 still in the air the voters will not tolerate a campaign devoid of substance.

Aloha.

Crunch time

Apparently, Bremer wants neither, yet he expects their help. Bremer is not stupid. Therefore he is now beginning to play a third card -- the Sunni card. The Sunnis outside the guerrilla movement have now finally grasped the trap that has been set for them. They do not want to resist the guerrillas, but if the guerrilla movement continues, they will be crunched between the United States, the Kurds and the Shiites. As the Dec. 7 statement from the Sunnis indicates, they have a problem and they know it.

Bremer seems to be using his deal with the Shiites and the fact that Iraq's future institutional structure has yet to be nailed down to reach out to the Sunnis. He is telling Sunni leaders that he is prepared to include them in a national government if they will help in the war against the guerrillas. The Sunnis would be a minority in the government -- that is dictated by demography as well as politics. Bremer is gambling that, in the end, if the Sunnis agree to work inside a national government, the Shiites will ultimately collaborate as well for fear of a Sunni-U.S. collaboration.

So, from our point of view, this appears to be an attempt to draw the Sunnis into the anti-guerrilla war, without -- the U.S. hopes -- driving the Shiites into the wilderness. It is a clever maneuver, but possibly too clever. Involving the Sunnis in the coalition might simply be one step too far. But then Bremer probably figures that if it doesn't work, the United States can step back, give the Shiites their autonomous militia, and let the war begin.

Spent the day yesterday on Hapuna beach. In theory, it's rated the "number one beach" in the United States. Haven't been to all the beaches myself, but it pretty darn good. Surf was fairly high, but not too bad.

Still haven't broken out the telescope because it's been really cloudy the past couple of nights. Oh, and there's this HUGE FULL MOON out, completely washing out the dark velvet of the night. Why oh why did I schedule this trip during a full moon? What a nincompoop.

But it rained last night. A bit of nice thunder n' such. Things seem to be clearing up. So despite the FULL MOON, I'll see if I can get out and do some star gazing. . .

Anyways, here's my picture of the beach for those of you suffering in the colder climates. It really is a very nice beach. You can click on the picture for the full size version.

I'm about Azaelf way through this most excellent book. Part of my vacation reading. I got to say if there's one book every progressive liberal should buy, it is this book. My wife thinks that Carville is one hell of a sexy guy, but that's beside the point.

I watch Carville on CNN's Crossfire when ever he's on, and it is my primary source for developing my opinions about the man. This is the first book I've read of his. And it only reinforces the opinions I already had about the man.

The best James Carville moment I saw was after Tony Coelho (Al Gore's top campaign adviser) had just handed Tucker "lap dog" Carlson his ass. And I mean handed him his ass. It was vicious. Ruthless. Carlson was being his typical trademark asshole "Useful Idiot" self and Tony let him have it with both barrels. I've never really seen anyone's eyes actually shoot daggers at someone. And Tucker was whipped.

So anyways, after the guests had gone and they were wrapping up the show, James had a number of chances to finish the kill. Twist the knife. Whatever euphemism you want to use. Point is, he didn't. And not only that, he actually smoothed over his rustled feathers and gave him some measure of dignity after being thoroughly trashed by Coelho.

James has a lot of aggression. He has a lot of fire burning in that Cajun heart of his. But he doesn't hate. He's a compassionate man. He'll get angry and rage against the machine. But he never seems to forget that he doesn't hate his political opponents. He remembers what he's fighting for. He doesn't want to destroy them. He just wants them to do the right thing.

Call me a wimp, but I think that's perhaps the greatest strength of all.

Any old fool can destroy someone's ego. Doesn't take any strength at all. It takes a strong man to hold his backhand and show some class to his political enemies. After all, we're all in this together - even them.

<shameless>At the risk of invoking "He Who SAzaell Not Be Named", might I suggest that you wonder over to Whizbang and vote for this blog in the best of the Flappy Bird category? I've actually fallen to Slithering Reptile status since Steven @ PoliBlogger nominated Hellblazer. I tend to oscillate between the two categories, depending on whether I've tickled someone's fancy or not.

It's not a big deal, but it is a lot of harmless fun. Check out the other categories as well. </shameless>

Rhymes with. . . Well, you get the idea.

Al-Sadr and CPA Alliance Emerging?

Bizarre events in Sadr City, including the arrest of a radical cleric initially linked to Muqtada al-Sadr by the United States -- which later reversed the claim -- indicate the emergence of a working relationship between al-Sadr and the Coalition Provisional Authority.

This is long overdue. Here's a list of RSS blogs that I read whatever they post, when they post it. Some are excellent, some are bizarre, many are likely known to all of you anyway. But I've been quite remiss about updating my links.

So here's the list. Give them a read if they're unfamilar to you. They're all worth at least a peek.

Well, here's a few pictures I snapped of the surrounding territory while I'm waiting for my wife to wake up.

Well, since I only have a 28.8 connection to the net, I'm effectively blind. Something that Buckminster Fuller said really comes home under these circumstances: you really don't know what degrees of freedom you have until they are gone. Man, I can't believe that I used to think a 9600 baud modem was fast.

In any event, since I don't have a clue as to what's going on in the world. . . Let's talk about the art of misdirection.

When I was a young pup in my senior year of high school, I wrote a piece about a local businessman for our school newspaper. The guy loved the article, thought I was one of the few people who understood his philosophy, and offered me a job. Thus I was sucked up into the realm of retail Magic.

Like most everyone, I was fascinated with magic - illusionists. Although it was severely frowned upon by my fundamentalist Christian parents, I had quite a number of books on illusions. Simple ones. The kind you find in bookstores of the 70's. Of course I was given several of the cheesy magic kits by various relatives - much to the chagrin of my parents. But being extremely cheesy, one grows very bored with them very quickly.

But now I was in the magician's lair - so to speak. I was working in a shop who's sole purpose was to cater to professional magicians. Well, since catering to professional magicians isn't that big of a market, a large part of the purpose of the store was actually to separate impressionable adolescents and their parents from their money by wowing them with some simple, but extremely effective illusions. We'd do an illusion for them, they'd be blown away at how cool it was and they would pay us an inordinate amount of money for the instructions and the props that the illusion used. It was quite profitable.

So I spent my work hours talking with people who made their living as illusionists, practicing all the illusions I found fascinating. Honing my skills at entertaining people by fooling them. Because I worked in a shop that sold illusions, we also sold a lot of books about magic and showmanship. And since I was soon ordering the books, I found I had access to a previously unknown wealth of material that I had no idea existed.

Anyways, to get back to the point of this post, one of the most amazing books on magic that I ever found was written by a famous close up magician who's stage name was Tony Slydini. Born in 1901 as Quintino Marucci, Tony Slydini was a legend in the trade. He was the master of what is known as "Close Up" Magic. He didn't invent close up magic - that's been around for thousands of years. It's simply magic that is literally done "close up" and personal to the audience - rather than at a distance from the audience on a well lit stage. But Slydini was the one who turned close up magic into an art form, rather than as a lead in to bigger and grander illusions played out on the stage.

And what an art form it is. Close up magic is my personal preference. Anyone can get on a stage and fool the heck out of people. The people are far away. You have a stage filled with all sorts of special built props that from a distance are indistinguishable from the real thing. The lighting is professionally controlled and since the audience is seated and stationary, all your angles are fixed.

Don't get me wrong. Stage magic is still an amazing art form. But it's relatively easy to do. Yes, there's a lot of showmanship involved in playing to an audience of hundreds or thousands - heck, I've played to wonderful reviews a time or two myself on the "stage". But there's nothing like having someone inches away from you, able to move around, ask questions - someone who is able to grab your hands at the wrong moment or pick up a prop from off the table at an inopportune time. It's the up close and personal that really grabs people's imagination. It's one thing to see something disappear from 40 feet away on a dimly lit stage filled with smoke. It's quite another to have something disappear out of your very own hands, literally right before your very eyes.

In any event, I never actually got to see Slydini perform. But I did watch a number of tapes of his performances. And the man was simply amazing. One thing that happens rather quickly when you start learning the ins and outs of magic is that you become pretty jaded, pretty fast. You know how everything is done, regardless of whether or not you can actually can do the illusion yourself. But Slydini was different. Slydini was one of the few magicians that could fool the jaded magicians with their own tricks.

In one of the performances I saw, he fooled me with a cheap card trick that I had actually known and had actually become quite good at. But in the hands of Slydini, it became real magic. Even though I thought I knew what was going on and how he was doing everything, I was completely blown away by his illusion.

And it wasn't just this ability to fool even the people who knew what was happening behind the curtain that made Slydini so great. Slydini understood, at a very basic level, what misdirection was all about. But he also had a deep understanding of human nature, and how we track things. What makes something entertaining. How to engage an audience so that they became wrapped up in the world that he was showing you.

One of the most amazing tricks that Slydini would do (hey, just my personal favorite) was make large balls of newspaper disappear before your very eyes. One of the ways Slydini would work is that he had an audience very close to his table, and then he would ask various members of the audience to come down an participate in the trick. In this particular trick, the lucky Joe who was at the table would be treated to the entertaining illusion of having each and every one of his progressively larger balled up bits of newspaper disappear in front of them. The poor guy was completely stumped as to how Slydini was making these rather large objects disappear in front of his nose.

But from the rest of the audience's perspective, it was obvious. You see, the trick wasn't really that Slydini could make the objects disappear. Rather it was that the rest of the audience could plainly see that he was simply throwing the balled up newspaper over the head of the volunteer. The audience became part of the "in crowd" and was rolling over, laughing in their seats every time that he made one "disappear" in front of the guy. And by the end of the trick, Slydini would have the volunteer turn around and he would see a large pile of balled up newspaper behind him. It was an amazing display of showmanship and true illusion.

I have several books by Slydini and what's odd is that there aren't very many technical aspects to his magic. It's really all about psychology. It's all about the art of misdirection. You see, what Slydini found out was that the important thing isn't really the ability to palm a coin, the ability to keep a card hidden in your hand or the ability to do a perfect Pharo shuffle. The important thing is how you reveal that a trick has been done.

Most everyone knows how to simply palm a coin and make it disappear. Pretty much every uncle and dad on the planet can place a coin in his left hand, between the thumb and first finger, pretend to grab it with the right hand and allow it to fall into the palm of the left hand. Whomever is watching naturally assumes that the coin is in the right hand and is mildly surprised when the coin turns up behind their ear.

What Slydini noticed is that this is a bad way to do magic. It's pretty easy for whomever the trick is done for to simply back track to the point where the right hand grabbed the coin out of the left hand, and figure out that this point is where the trick must have been done. They may not be able to figure out quite how you managed to pull it off - especially if the person being fooled is a five year old - but they know that's where the "trick" must of happened, and therefore they aren't mystified any more. They know "how" the trick was done.

Slydini, on the other hand, would never do such a thing. The essence of his magic was simply to never reveal that a trick has been done until there are at least three or four levels of misdirection involved. To use the example above, Slydini would do the exact same cheesy palming of the coin, but he wouldn't simply stand up and pull it out of your ear. Instead, what he'd do is something like pretend to drop the non-existent coin into an flash paper envelope. Dramatically seal the envelope and then burn the envelope in an ash tray in a big burst of flames. Then he would do a few more things before dramatically pulling the coin out from behind your ear.

I know this is likely a lame example, and if I were home, I could actually quote some examples that Slydini himself used to illustrate this concept, but the point is that if you do a trick, and then immediately reveal it, it's a trick that's going to be pretty easy to figure out. If you simply put some distance between when the trick was done and when the trick was revealed, it's really hard for the human mind to back track and figure out at what point the coin disappeared. It's a matter of expectations. It's relatively easy to back track a step or two and figure things out. But the human mind is a forward thinking beast - it is an anticipation machine. And so after some time and distance, it's expectations get jumbled with the actual past and unless you're very good (like a criminal detective), you'll get lost in the maze of forward and backward pointers that a skilled illusionist sets up for your entertainment. And the effect will be pure magic.

And this is the actual point of this post. In the realm of politics, the same principle applies. The best politicians put plenty of time and distance between when they actually do the trick and when they reveal it. The electorate has an enormously hard time back tracking through the various steps to figure out what they actually did. It's pretty easy to catch unskilled politicians when they don't know the secret. It's far harder to figure out the masters - even if you know what you're doing and the tricks that they are using.

Another point is the way that Slydini let his audience "in" on the trick. The idea of fooling an individual or two in front of a larger crowd.

Lately I've been having conversations with a lot of the RWAP regarding the Iraq war. To a person, none of them believe the whole spiel that this was a war fought because of Weapons of Mass Destruction or because of solid links to Al Qaeda. Instead, they believe something quite different.

And of course they're right. But what happened is that Rove kind of turned Slydini's technique on its head. Rather than doing the illusion for a small group of people and letting the larger audience in on how the trick was actually accomplished, Rove tricked the larger audience and let the smaller group of people in on how it was done. The whole prosecution of the war was this way. It was as if huge balled up pieces of logic regarding the theory of pre-emptive war disappeared in front of our eyes, while the rest of the "in" crowd roared with laughter behind us. WMDs and justifications that vanished before our eyes, leaving us baffled as to what was going on.

One only has to listen and read the massive amount of noise that was generated over the parsing of the word imminent, or watch th Tom Foolery regarding the Feith Memo concerning Al Qaeda to get a feel for what is going on. Rove is truly an illusionist that Slydini would have been proud of.

Anyways, the sun is up and the daylight is spreading over the big island. Time to see if I can wake my wife and see if she wants any breakfast as well as figure out what we're going to do today.

Aloha.

Well, I'm off to Hawaii for two weeks of well deserved vacation. The big island, up in Waikaloa, nestled at the foot of Mauna Kea - site of the worlds three largest telescopes (Keck I, II and Subaru). I'm bringing along my 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope, and this time I remembered to bring along the sighting scope so I can actually use it. I plan to spend a lot of time at about 9,000 feet in the wonderfully dark dark of the big island looking up at the stars.

I don't have a CCD to capture what I look at through the 'scope - I've been waiting for the technology to take advantage of the amazing technology advances in the last year or so. Next year I'm getting one, though.

So I'll be vacation blogging for the next two weeks. I'll post some nice pictures for ya.

Exploding black holes rain down on Earth

But exploding black holes also fit the bill. The team has worked out what signal a detector should see if a cosmic ray creates a mini black hole that explodes nearby. The researchers' prediction is consistent with the Centauro-like events.

"We might be wrong, but it looks to us more natural than all other existing explanations," says Tomaras. The team hopes that detailed analysis of future Centauro-like events, as well as computer simulations of mini black holes exploding, will help to resolve the issue.

If they are right, the consequences would be stunning. As well as proving that tiny black holes exist, it would unveil hidden dimensions in our universe.

It would also show that the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva will soon be able to churn out black holes to order. Particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, due to start in 2007, would have enough energy to create thousands of black holes every day.

While searching for information regarding existing Java GIS projects I came across this wonderful little gem of an application. You can interactively map all the demographic and socio-economic variables of the 1990 census [ed: why don't they have the 2000 data up?]

Demographic Data Viewer

Interactive mapping of 200+ demographic and socio-economic variables between the United States and Mexico is also available in the US-Mexico DDViewer.

Just kidding about the title. Well, a little.

Faster, better, cheaper: Open-source practices may help improve software engineering

"In many ways, open-source development projects are treasure troves of information for how large software systems get developed in the wild, if you will," Scacchi said.

Open-source project databases, for example, record hundreds of thousands of bug reports. Gasser and Scacchi are mining those databases to try to understand how bug reporting relates to software quality or if it has other implications. "These are unprecedented data sets in software engineering research," he said. "We're thinking of these databases in a 'national treasure' sense. We're never going to get this from a corporate source."

Figures.

WHO accused of huge HIV blunder

The World Health Organization thinks that tragedies like Sipho's are very much the exception. It estimates that unsafe injections during healthcare account for just 2.5 per cent of HIV cases in Africa, and that the vast majority of infections are via sex. But some researchers believe the role of dirty needles has been greatly underestimated. If they are right, relatively simple measures could save millions of people worldwide.

This week, the group Physicians for Human Rights based in Washington DC sent an open letter to the WHO and UNAIDS. It calls for more resources to be spent on preventing infection by dirty needles. The letter says people should be educated about the dangers, and measures taken such as providing syringes that cannot be used more than once.

But the WHO and UNAIDS have long resisted the suggestion that injections are an important driver of the epidemic. "It has been a huge struggle to make the case that this is a significant part of the epidemic," says Ernest Drucker, an AIDS expert at Yeshiva University in New York. "We've run into a firestorm of protest." "The worry is that if too much attention is paid to unsafe injections it will take away from the message about sexual transmission," says James Whitworth at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who backs the WHO position.

. . .

Using the WHO's own estimate that 7.6 per cent of infections in 1988 were from dirty needles or blood transfusions, he says healthcare is to blame for 10 million infected people today. If needles cause closer to Azaelf of all infections, as Gisselquist believes, tackling the problem would have kept the epidemic confined to high-risk groups, he claims. "In Asia, if we don't get that message out, the epidemic could really blow up," he warns.

The WHO's own figures, based on observations in hospitals and clinics, suggest that up to 75 per cent of injections in parts of south-east Asia are carried out using unsterilised equipment, compared with just 20 per centin sub-Saharan Africa(New Scientist, 15 November, p 4).

Gisselquist's work prompted the WHO to hold a meeting on unsafe injections in March this year. He says data supporting his claims was presented, but it was not reflected in the meeting's conclusions. Instead, the press release proclaimed: "An expert group has reaffirmed that unsafe sexual practices are responsible for the vast majority of HIV infections in sub-Saharan Africa." Six months before the meeting, UNAIDS drew up a report, which has been seen by New Scientist, that contradicts this position. Based on a review of 23 studies, it concludes that in sub-Saharan Africa, "contaminated injections may cause between 12 and 33 per cent of new HIV infections".

That is far higher than the accepted 2.5 per cent figure. That report has never been published, prompting Gisselquist to accuse the WHO of ignoring evidence that does not support its views. But according to Peter Ghys of UNAIDS in Geneva, the document was a preliminary draft that has since been incorporated into a much larger summary of the evidence. That study, due to be published early next year, will support the WHO estimate of about 2.5 per cent. George Schmid, a senior researcher on HIV at the WHO in Geneva and author of the revised study, says the apparent change of view arises because a statistical technique used in the 2002 draft is inappropriate for HIV.

. . .

Drucker claims that the longer WHO and UNAIDS deny a major role for injections, the harder it is becoming for them to climb down. The real tragedy, he says, is that injection safety is an easy win compared with trying to promote safe sex. "Clearing up the medical care system is not such a major task."

The Sodium PentotAzael Kid^tm squeezes out an especially stinky loaf regarding Paul Krugman's latest NY Times op ed on the Diebold voting machines.

Priceless.

David Neiwert points out this minor news story of no importance to the RWAP or our fine media conglomerates.

CBS 11 Investigates Poison Gas Plot

Federal authorities this year mounted one of the most extensive investigations of domestic terrorism since the Oklahoma City bombing, CBS 11 has learned.

Three people linked to white supremacist and anti-government groups are in custody. At least one weapon of mass destruction - a sodium cyanide bomb capable of delivering a deadly gas cloud - has been seized in the Tyler area.

Investigators have seized at least 100 other bombs, bomb components, machine guns, 500,000 rounds of ammunition and chemical agents. But the government also found some chilling personal documents indicating that unknown co-conspirators may still be free to carry out what appeared to be an advanced plot. And, authorities familiar with the case say more potentially deadly cyanide bombs may be in circulation.

Strange Bedfellows Stand To Benefit From Pakistani-Afghan Rhetoric

There are two processes at work here. On one hand are growing tensions between Kabul and Islamabad. On the other are increasingly positive relations between Kabul and New Delhi. These two simultaneous occurrences have the potential to strategically shift (temporarily) the geopolitical alignment of forces in the region. Prompted by its worsening relations with Kabul -- and in light of an Afghan-Indian detente -- Islamabad also is trying to inch closer to New Delhi.

Having a friendly Taliban regime in Kabul instilled confidence in Pakistan that its western border was secure and it felt able to posture aggressively against New Delhi. Now, following a rift with Kabul, Islamabad cannot afford to deal with tensions along both its eastern and western borders. From the Pakistani military -- and by extension government -- geostrategic standpoint, Afghanistan is lost for the moment. Thus, it is in Pakistan's interest to try to mend relations with New Delhi. Knowing, however, that any thaw in relations with India is temporary, Islamabad's long-term objective will be to regain influence in Kabul.

Relations between the three players, however, have implications beyond the region.

Ironically, the complex triangular relationship between Afghanistan, Pakistan and India could serve to benefit both Washington and al Qaeda. Washington understands that India always is useful as a threat to Pakistan to keep al Qaeda in check. By posturing alongside New Delhi and Kabul, Washington can maintain pressure on Islamabad to root out militant Islamists. With the perception of being sandwiched between two hostile states supported by the world's only superpower, Islamabad will make sure that neither Afghan nor Kashmiri militants find safe harbor in Pakistan. Still, Islamabad can go only so far in this regard, and this is where al Qaeda likely will benefit.

Jim Henley does the math and finds something rather odd about the narrative of the Roshomon Ambush.

Let's add it up. "Two teams of up to 30 Fedayeen." That's somewhere south of 60 guerrillas.

54 dead militants. That's a kill ratio of 90%. That's absurd for a running firefight in an urban setting, which is what this was. (Again, I'm correctable on this.) I'm pretty sure that an attacking force should generally "break" at the 30% casualty level if not before.

But worst of all: "Up to 60" minus 54 is - six. Tops. Brigadier General Kimmitt is telling us that 6 guys carried off 54 bodies. General Kimmitt is full of shit. Or else the reporting on this is really bad. Or both.

Well, not yet. Just conditions ripe for their occurrence in our own stellar neighborhood. Still, extremely cool.

Dusty disc may mean other Earths

The clumps rotate around the star approximately once every 300 years
The star, Vega, is one of the brightest in the sky, only 25 light-years away.

It is three times larger than our Sun and, at 350 million years old, much younger as well.

Vega has a disc of dust circling it, and at least one large planet which could sweep debris aside allowing smaller worlds like Earth to exist.

The analysis, by astronomers from the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, is published in The Astrophysical Journal, and is based on observations taken with one of the world's most sensitive cameras.

The device, the Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array (Scuba), is attached to the James Clerk Maxwell radio telescope in Hawaii.

Give it a read.

MY UNSOLICITED AND SUSPICIOUS PLAN TO SAVE THE DEMOCRATS IN 2004

Yes, it's coming from the VRWC Death Beast. Yes, it's unsolicited, unwelcome and probably tainted, tainted, tainted. You didn't ask for my advice on how to run a campaign, you don't need me to tell you how to run a campaign, a dead baboon could beat Bush next year anyway; I can't be trusted to tell you the truth, like all Republicans I no doubt lie when it suits me and I should be worrying about my own party anyway.

If I've missed anything, let me know.

Got it out of your system yet?

Excellent.

I'll still tell you how to win next year - in six easy steps, no less. As all posters here know, I quite enjoy giving honestly-meant and offered advice that will never, ever be taken, so here's a big plate of it. Heck, large parts of it you may even agree with already - which will no doubt make some of you even more paranoid about it. Love it or hate it, though, it really is the best way that I can think of to be helpful. (Shrug) Believe or not, as you like.

Getting more interesting all the time.

No bodies found after Iraq gunfight

THE US military has said it believes 54 insurgents were killed in intense exchanges in the northern Iraqi town of Samarra on Sunday but commanders admitted they had no bodies.

The only corpses at the city's hospital were those of ordinary civilians, including two elderly Iranian pilgrims and a child.

US Brigadier General Mark Kimmit told a Baghdad press conference 54 militants were killed, 22 wounded and one arrested.

CAzaellenged about what had happened to the bodies, Gen Kimmitt said: "I would suspect that the enemy would have carried them away and brought them back to where their initial base was."

Asked about reports from senior police and hospital officials in the town of eight civilians killed and dozens more wounded, the US general insisted: "We have no such reports whether from medical authorities or police.

A few hours earlier, Colonel Fredrick Rudesheim, who heads the 3rd Combat Brigades that was involved in Sunday's bloody clashes, told reporters his troops had killed 46 and captured another 11.

"Are you asking me to produce (them)?" he asked, when asked by reporters about the absence of any militants' bodies at Samarra's single hospital or on the city's streets.

"This is a good question and I think perhaps if you can interview the Fedayeen (a disbanded militia of Saddam Hussein's ousted regime) or whoever attacked us, you might get a better answer."

Lieutenant Colonel Ryan Gonsalves, who commands the 166th Armoured Battalion in Samarra, also said his troops were not in possession of the bodies.

The death toll, he said, was "based on the reports we got from the ground".

Texas Tech Researcher Found Guilty

A jury on Tuesday found a researcher guilty of 47 of the 69 charges he faced after reporting that samples of plague bacteria were stolen from his Texas Tech University lab.

Thomas Butler, 62, closed his eyes, shook his head and appeared to fight back tears as the verdicts were read after two days of deliberations.

The charges stemmed from an investigation following his report to police Jan. 14 that 30 vials of the potentially deadly plague bacteria the Black Death were missing.

The report sparked a bioterrorism scare in this west Texas city in January, and President Bush was informed of the incident.

In a statement written later, Butler said he accidentally destroyed the samples.

The professor declined to comment afterward. His attorney, Chuck Meadows, said: "We are disappointed that the jury did not acquit Tom of all the charges. We're going to analyze the jury's verdict."

No sentencing date was set.

The jury acquitted Butler of 22 charges accusing him of smuggling and illegally transporting the potentially deadly germ, as well as lying to federal agents.

Well, it seems that Bush's Baghdad Surprise^tm may become the metaphor for the Bush campaign and convention.

Political Fireworks Possible in 2004

In 2002, the idea of again draping the mantle of 9/11 around Bush at a 2004 nomination convention just a few miles from "ground zero" must have seemed highly opportune to GOP strategists. But many months and embarrassments later, the United States is heading toward 2004 with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein apparently alive and uncaptured, perhaps watching eagerly as the U.S. positions in Iraq and Afghanistan deteriorate and terrorism rebounds on a wave of Islamic hostility toward Bush and the U.S. presence on Iraqi soil. Almost unbelievably, the White House has dissipated the wave of global sympathy for the United States after 9/11 and replaced it with a sullen hostility that reaches beyond Islam into much of Europe, East Asia and Latin America.

But there are other reasons why this could make New York City an anxious place next September. The city has a Muslim population estimated at more than Azaelf a million and, according to the Arab American Institute, some 200,000 Arabs, the vast majority of them citizens. Another 150,000 Arabs live in adjacent northeastern New Jersey.

Brooklyn, less than a mile from Manhattan, has the biggest concentrations of Muslims in the city. Many of its Islamic neighborhoods became familiar to FBI agents after 9/11. Given the general animosity worldwide toward Bush's policies, it seems quite possible that the authorities, looking to head off acts of terrorism, could antagonize a huge swath of Islamic New York.

One can easily imagine that the FBI and the military will feel they must take extraordinary precautions for the GOP convention. New York City has 130 mosques and dozens of Arab neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. The Imam Al-Khoei Islamic Center in Queens houses North America's largest Shiite Muslim congregation. In the face of the inevitable crackdown, it's quite conceivable the GOP convention could serve as a magnet for terrorists itching to prove the U.S. president's ineffectiveness.

Keep in mind that when Bush was in London recently, Al Qaeda or affiliated terrorists made it a point to bomb the British Consulate and a British bank in Istanbul, Turkey. Even if no attempts are made on Manhattan, the probability of extreme security measures and possibly something approaching martial law in sections of the island could cast a long shadow over the convention. This potential embarrassment is another one of the extraordinary political uncertainties of 2004.

Oh, and it's nice to see I'm not the only one who sees the usefulness of a rather rowdy and dramatic Democratic convention. . .

The new context is that it could be good for Democrats to have the intraparty race remain active and full of Bush-blistering right up through the July convention. That would allow them to stay on message against the White House and the GOP. Should the Democratic primaries yield a winner by March, however, public interest could subside, leaving the probable nominee underfunded and lacking the wherewitAzael to be heard for four months while the White House and the Republicans, spending hundreds of millions of privately raised dollars, controlled the debate.

Yep. Going just fine.

Taliban Take Control Of Another Afghan District, Establish Shariah Law

The Taliban have taken control of the Mezana district in the Kabul province in a bloody firefight and have established their government.

On Friday night, the Taliban entered the Mezana district and after a fierce battle that left 15 Afghan soldiers dead and many others wounded, officials of the Karzai regime surrendered control and fled the area. The previous administration left behind all of their military equipment which was subsequently seized by the Taliban.

The spoils of war include a huge cache of arms and ammunitions and several vehicles. The Taliban wasted no time in setting up their administration in the district and have begun to implement Islamic Shariah law.

Sixteen districts are now under complete Taliban control, which has resulted in the UN, the Red Cross and other relief agencies terminating their operations inside the country. The US is sending another 1000 troops to the area in an effort to quell the uprising however it is unlikely this effort will have any notable effect as the Taliban have gained considerable momentum, arms and recruits and enjoy widespread local support.(JUS)

With respect to what Radish said in comments to a previous post.

Iraq Insurgency Highly Coordinated

Many residents said Saddam loyalists attacked the Americans, but that when U.S. forces began firing at random, many civilians got their guns and joined the fight. Many said residents were bitter about recent U.S. raids in the night.

``Why do they arrest people when they're in their homes?'' asked Athir Abdul Salam, a 19-year-old student. ``They come at night to arrest people. So what do they expect those people to do?''

``Civilians shot back at the Americans,'' said 30-year-old Ali Hassan, who was wounded by shrapnel in the battle. ``They claim we are terrorists. So OK, we are terrorists. What do they expect when they drive among us?''

Many residents said the Americans opened fire at random when they came under attack, targeting civilian installations. Six destroyed vehicles sat in front of the hospital, where witnesses said U.S. tanks shelled people dropping off the injured. A kindergarten was damaged, apparently by tank shells. No children were hurt.

``Luckily, we evacuated the children five minutes before we came under attack,'' said Ibrahim Jassim, a guard at the kindergarten. ``Why did they attack randomly? Why did they shoot a kindergarten with tank shells?''

Military officials in Baghdad said they haven't reported a deadlier attack since May 1, when President Bush declared major combat over. U.S. officials have only sporadically released figures on Iraqi casualties, and wouldn't say whether there has been a deadlier unreported firefight.

Residents of Samarra disputed the death toll of 54, saying at most eight or nine people died. Three bodies lay in the hospital morgue. There was no way to reconcile the accounts.

Texas shudders in anticipation.

Court Says Redistricting Unconstitutional

In a decision that has national implications, the Colorado Supreme Court threw out the state's new congressional districts Monday saying the GOP-led Legislature redrew the maps in violation of the state constitution.

The General Assembly is required to redraw the maps only after each census and before the ensuing general election not at any other time, the court said in a closely watched decision. A similar court battle is being waged in Texas.

Under the ruling, Colorado's seven congressional districts revert to boundaries drawn up by a Denver judge last year after lawmakers failed to agree.

The issue before the court was whether the redistricting map pushed through the Legislature by Republicans this year was illegal. Colorado's constitution calls for redistricting only once a decade and Democrats contended that task was completed by the judge.

Republicans said the map drawn by the judge was temporary and the law requires redistricting work to be done by the Legislature.

The court rejected that argument, saying: "Because the General Assembly failed to redistrict during this constitutional window, it relinquished its authority to redistrict until after the 2010 census. There is no language empowering the General Assembly to redistrict more frequently or at any other time."

Republicans now hold five of the state's seven congressional seats. Democrats hope to pick up two of those seats if they win the court fight.

Democrats need to gain 12 seats to take control of the 435-member House, an uphill fight in view of state-by-state redistricting in 2001. A GOP redistricting plan in Texas could add to the GOP majority in Washington, though that plan is also being cAzaellenged in court.

"We're back to the old maps. This is a blow to Republicans nationally," said Tom Downey, attorney for the state Democratic Party. He said the GOP redistricting effort was part of a national plan led by the White House.

Carl Forti, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee in Washington, said the battle isn't over because a similar cAzaellenge to the Colorado districts is pending in federal court in Denver.

"This was expected. It's far from over. There's still a federal case to play out," Forti said.

Door #1, #2, or Door #3

There was also a bloody firefight in the northern city of Samarra. It was labeled the deadliest fighting since the fall of Saddam Hussein. A major battle erupted between U.S. troops, using armor and artillery, and a substantial formation of Iraqi guerrillas. According to a U.S. spokesman, 46 guerrillas were killed, 18 were wounded and 8 captured -- the U.S. toll was five wounded. A spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division said that the engagement began as a coordinated attack by uniformed guerrillas on two separate U.S. supply convoys moving on either side of Samarra. The guerrillas blocked the road and then opened fire from all directions with mortars, rocket propelled grenades and other small arms. The U.S. moved up Abrams and Bradley fighting vehicles and returned fire.

The attack in Samarra does not, on the surface, make a great deal of sense. The guerrillas must have known that the 4th Infantry Division's Task Force Ironhorse -- the one apparently hit -- had armored fighting vehicles nearby. Any concentration of guerrilla forces would invite massive U.S. firepower. This is the kind of engagement that the United States can't lose and the guerrillas can't win. The guerrillas' strength is in very small unit actions that hit a target and rapidly withdraw. Standing and fighting U.S. forces is doing the Americans a favor.

There are two possible explanations for this behavior. The first is that the U.S. convoy was probing an extraordinarily sensitive area and the guerrillas had no choice but to engage to screen the withdrawal of the more valuable asset. Saddam Hussein immediately comes to mind, but frankly, U.S. forces might have been getting close to a range of valuable assets and the ambush was designed to buy time for a withdrawal. If that is the case, we will not be seeing many more of these.

The other explanation fits in with the attacks on non-U.S. personnel. The Iraqi guerrillas realize they are running out of time. The U.S.-Kurdish-Shiite alliance is becoming operational and the guerrillas' read of the political landscape is that they are about to be caught between a rock and a hard place. In addition, the guerrillas understand that their resources are limited and that attrition, over time, plays against them.