May 2004 Archives

Still digging sewers on the ninth level of hell. Be glad you aren't me.

Update: Comments seem to now be "self approving" meaning that I am unleashed from your tyranny.

Update 2: Strike that last comment (ha, ha). Seem to be back to reality, style wise. Comments seem back on the fritz. What a bunch of work to get right back where I was before. . . Individual entries still look weird, need to get to that, too. If it were me, I wouldn't upgrade to MT 3.0. Not without blocking out a heck of a lot of time - well, if you're a bozo like me.

One of my all time highest porn related links: Big Dick Takes Record For The Longest.

This post is actually relevant today, as it's about this story from last year:

Ex-CIA Agent on Cheney Iraq Speech: "Longest Statement of Disinformation" Ever Fed U.S. Public

Well, this is the longest statement of disinformation that I think the American government has distributed to the American people. You know, the very obvious thing is where are the nuclear weapons. Why haven't we found the nuclear weapons? Why haven't we found the evidence that he was really trying to import uranium and enrich uranium for nuclear weapons? Where are the scud-type missiles that Cheney was talking about? Where are the hundreds and hundreds of tons of chemical agents that he said, and the C.I.A. said could fill 16,000 rockets. Where are the huge numbers of materials that were supposedly produced for thousands of liters of Anthrax and botulinum toxin and all of the other biological agents that Colin Powell listed in his speech to the UN--which was written for him by the C.IA. after he turned down a version of the speech that was written for him by Dick Cheney's chief subordinate? Where is any of this material? The fact of the matter is that there was no clear and present danger, there was no imminent threat. And for Dick Cheney just to recite these charges that we all know now not to be true, adds to the terrible politicization of intelligence that's created a scandal in the intelligence community unlike anything I ever saw in my 24 years in the C.I.A. That includes the period of Vietnam, the period of the intelligence failure on the Soviet union, and the incredibly contentious disputes over arms control.

I'm glad that the WWII Vets got an honest to "Bob" memorial in our capital. I think it's necessary to have a physical reminder of the sacrifices of those who came before us. Sacrifices that allowed us to have the kind of life we have today. All most excellent applications of human industry and ritual.

But there's something about it that bothers me as well. A physical memorial can allow us to switch on and off our remembrance of these brave soldiers and civilians that fought to protect our way of life and to do what's right. The last Monday in May, we gather up all our reverence and thank "Bob" we have the day off to spend with friends and visit the new WWII memorial.

The rest of the time we give it hardly a thought.

The true memorial we provide for those who sacrificed for our country is the society we provide for our children. The society we provide for ourselves. The society we provide for the world. The society they fought and died for.

I know people like to honor the dead, but I just have the feeling that the dead would rather see us honor the living and those who have yet to live. They died for the future, not the past. The memorials we erect in the physical reality are reminders of the enormous price that has been paid to allow us to live as we currently live. The memorial we should be striving for is a society that lives up to their greatest ideals.

The past is better honored by providing a better future.

There's been a lot of follow up on the dustup between Dean Esmay and several other bloggers regarding the whole "Stab in the Back" meme.

Well, with just 15% of the polls in, I think we can see the beginning of a trend.

San Francisco gallery owner becomes target after showcasing painting of Iraqi prisoner abuse

A San Francisco gallery owner bears a painful reminder of the nation's unresolved anguish over the incidents at the Abu Ghraib prison - a black eye delivered by an unknown assailant who apparently objected to a painting that depicts U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners.

The assault outside the Capobianco gallery in the city's North Beach district Thursday night was the worst in a string of verbal and physical attacks directed at Lori Haigh since the artwork was installed at her gallery on May 16.

Haigh realized the nerve the painting had struck when she arrived at work to find the place egged and heaps of trash dumped at the gallery entrance. On her computer and voice mail were stinging messages calling her anti-American for showing the artwork.

Geesh.

Again, I'm just stunned by all this hammering. It's like wave after wave after punishing wave crashing down upon the good ship Bush. If I could remember where my tinfoil hat is, I would think that what we've seen over the last five or six months is the result of a well organized plan to overthrow the Mayberry Machiavellis. Pre-order yours today.

Bush dynasty ex-wife set to spill the beans

A new book on the Bush dynasty is set for release just six weeks before November's knife-edge presidential election. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty by Kitty Kelley will have an initial print run of 500,000, and the main source is believed to be Sharon Bush, the ex-wife of Neil, President George W Bush's wayward brother.

Kelley, whose unauthorized biographies of Frank Sinatra, Jackie Onassis and the British Royal Family have told tales of affairs, electric-shock treatment and more affairs, has turned her attention to America's first family.

The book could be the most damaging yet for the President, with the publishers, Random House, promising it will "cause controversy".

These guys are toast.

Let me just say from the outset that the Federal Reserve has confirmed our Stock Market Crash forecast by raising the Money Supply (M-3) by crisis proportions, up another 46.8 billion this past week. What awful calamity do they see? Something is up. This is unprecedented, unheard-of pre-catastrophe M-3 expansion. M-3 is up an amount that we've never seen before without a crisis - $155 billion over the past 4 weeks, a $2.0 trillion annualized pace, a 22.2 percent annualized rate of growth!!! There must be a crisis of historic proportions coming, and the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States is making sure that there is enough liquidity in place to protect our nation's fragile financial system. The amazing thing is, the Fed's actions mean they know what is about to happen. They are aware of a terrible, horrific imminent event. What could it be?

One can draw no other conclusion except that the Fed is acting irresponsibly in its managing the money supply, in fulfilling its duty to "maintain a stable currency." I reject the notion that the Fed is acting irresponsibly. No, something is up, bigger than we have ever seen in the history of the United States. Let me ramble. Perhaps they simply see the ominous technical landscape we have been warning about in recent issues, and are attempting to pull out all the stops to avert the predicted crash. The recent rally in just about everything is similar to 2003's market behavior when the Fed pumped massive amounts of liquidity into the system during the first Azaelf of the year. This time seems different. The amount of liquidity is too large. The Fed is deflating the value of the monetary base by a fifth! Why are they willing to do this? Wisdom says something bad is up - big time.

In any event, the whole article is pretty scarry.

The Federal Reserve, contrary to our oftentimes cynical commentary, is not going to inflate the Money Supply 22 percent simply to get Dubya reelected. That sort of M-3 rise creates substantial financial risks that don't justify its necessity. No, something horrific is on the horizon - and soon. Perhaps the Open Market Committee was treated to a preview of The Day After Tomorrow - and they believed it! I don't want to be an alarmist, but I am reporting what I see. Like in the movie, it may be time for prayer. The Master Planners' prayer is that all markets float higher on the rising tide of swelling money and that the coming catastrophe be mitigated or delayed. Should they be successful in extending the Bubbles, greater imbalances emerge and the ultimate market event will be worse than if now. Defensive strategies are warranted.

"But be sure of this, that if the head of the house
had known at what time of the night the thief was coming,
he would have been on the alert and would not
have allowed his house to be broken into."
Matthew 24:43

Qaeda Attack Kills at Least 9 Saudis, 7 Foreigners

Al Qaeda-linked militants killed at least nine Saudis and seven foreigners in a string of attacks in an oil-industry city on Saturday, then took hostages and fled with security forces in hot pursuit.

Saudi security sources said an American, a Briton, an Egyptian, two Filipinos, an Indian and a Pakistani died in the attacks on foreigners' compounds in the eastern city of Khobar, along with two Saudi civilians and seven security force members.

"I can confirm the death of at least one American. There may be more," a U.S. embassy official said.

Witnesses said a body had been dragged through the streets, apparently by militants, in the third attack against foreigners in less than a month in the birthplace of Islam. It appeared aimed at the crucial and in part Western-run oil industry.

Yi. Someone actually blogging from the trenches inside Iraq - unlike the valiant members of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders. Oh, and be a mench and donate what you can to him.

Dear Friends-

So to the people who think they’re being fed a stream of lies from the press corps here, I’m going to disagree. To those who think the reporters aren’t aggressive enough in sticking it to The Man and reporting on the abuses, you have no idea what it’s like trying to get accurate and verifiable information here. Often it just doesn’t exist, and you can’t just take Iraqis’ words for it. They’re very passionate and have very strong opinions about the current life in Iraq and frankly, they’ll exaggerate, repeat and amplify gossip until it’s conventional wisdom, even though it has only a fleeting resemblance to the truth.

To those who think that reporters aren’t supporting the war effort enough and “refuse” to report good news, well, here’s a shocker: There isn’t much good news to report. The security situation is growing worse. The power is still bad (three hours on, three hours off, or so.) Major U.S. contractors are bypassing Iraqi companies, leading to growing resentment. What kinda sorta good news there is is being pretty well covered. The (maybe) truce between Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and U.S. forces in the south, the coming together, however shakily, of a caretaker government. I refuse to reprint the press releases that pour out of the CPA on any given day. Most of the “good news” they release has to do with passing out free soccer balls to kids. Is this what should be reported when U.S. troops and Iraqis are dying every day?

Like the woman on the day of the car bomb who wailed that “The Americans did it!” I got some flack for just quoting her, but I included her not because I believed her (I don’t.) but because her reaction is part of the story. To those who think the press doesn’t pay enough attention to the Iraqis: This woman is a prime, albeit exaggerated, example. I would honestly be shocked if the U.S. had done this and I don’t think it did. You have to examine Iraqis’ statements critically. This one was easy, others are not.

To those who criticized me for even quoting her, if you don’t like that Iraqis feel this way and express themselves by blaming the Americans, well, too damn bad. The occupying forces — including the Americans — are responsible for security under the United Nations resolution. So far, they haven’t done a very good job of providing it.

My point in all of this is that the reporters I’ve met so far are smart, talented and very good at what they do. Many of them most emphatically do not stay in the Green Zone. Most live and run around Baghdad in constant fear for their lives. All of us are trying to a do a job and stay safe at the same time, which is the same thing Iraqis are trying to do every day. And like Iraqis, the journalists I’ve met are frustrated with the security situation.

• Green is historical budget authority.

• Yellow is the "placeholder" budget in the President's budget message in April 2001. This was the budget that presumably was used to defend the debate over tax cuts.

• SECDEF Rumsfeld's review during the summer of 2001 led to the identification of the FY02 amendment in August 2001, but a new five year plan kicking off of that amendment was not constructed prior to 9-11.

• The blue wedge is the 5 yr program as it stood in November 2001, but it does not reflect the impact of the "war" on terror (WOT), or operations in Afghanistan, or Iraq.  It resulted from decisions made in the summer program review, which ended in August of 2001.

• The red bars raise the budget to the level that was submitted to Congress as FY03-07 topline.  Although coincidental to the WOT, it actually raised the "core" (non-war) program.  The first funds clearly identifiable for war purposes appear as the small lavender bar in 2002.

• The black line represents a revision to the DoD core program estimate in February 2003.

• The lavender represents funds for the WOT, Afghanistan, and Iraq, including the November 2003 $87 billion supplemental.

I'm humbly proposing that we should define a new measurement unit, the CAzaelabi, defining how big of stooge one is. Like the Farad, or the Tesla, this unit is usually too large for most uses. For example, to be taken in by a pool hustler is aproximately 1 nano CAzaelabi - i.e. you would be one billion times less of a stooge than those who fell for CAzaelabi hook, line and sinker. Being taken in by a Nigerian official looking to transfer 25 Million dollars (US) through your account is approximately 1.25 micro CAzaelabis.

Still, as large as the CAzaelabi unit obviously is, there are indications we may witness kilo CAzaelabis or maybe even mega CAzaelabis in the near future. As experiments have shown, the true reality of how big a stooge one is exponentially increases after the first undeniable revelation and subsequent covering of one's ass that goes on in the aftermath. Note that CAzaelabis are transitive - i.e. how big of a stooge does one have to be to keep believing someone that has been shown to be a stooge. There is some controversy as to whether the transitive CAzaelabi is greater or less than the original quantity of stooge. Most experts believe that relative velocity has a great deal to do with this secondary effect - i.e. how fast one's frame of reference is running towards or away from the whole stinky pile of dung.

The existing English units of stoogeness, the Shemp, is equal to 27.58331002 nano CAzaelabis.

I've really have little tolerance for the whole "Who does Al Qaeda want to win the election". But proving that good things can still rise out of the dung heap of juvenile conversational memes, the Philosoraptor uses this stinky loaf as a launching pad to sink his claws into the defenders of the Iraq war and rip them a new one.

Stunning, astounding, incredible as those failures are, they all pale in comparison to the Administration’s greatest error. Failing to decapitate al Qaeda at Tora Bora was a blunder of historical proportions, but the reason the administration failed to do so is even more astounding: they wanted to preserve our troops for an attack elsewhere. If the planned attack had been against a more dangerous enemy, then this would have been rational. But, of course, it wasn’t. Even had we allowed bin Laden to slip away merely because we didn’t want to commit enough troops, or because we didn’t want to undertake such an expensive effort, this would have merely been an act of astounding incompetence. But instead the administration withheld troops in order to strike elsewhere. And, again, if the country we ultimately attacked had merely been unconnected with bin Laden in any way, this action would have merely been tragically idiotic. But no. The Bush administration allowed bin Laden to escape so that we could attack one of bin Laden’s enemies, the man bin Laden himself called “a bad Muslim.”

Imagine bin Laden’s relief—and disbelief. To get a sense for it, I suppose you’d have to contemplate something like the following scenario: you have been wounded and cornered, without hope of escape, by a ravenous tiger. You see it approach your for the kill…but, as you prepare to make peace with your maker, the tiger not only turns and runs away, but runs into the next county and eats somebody you really hate. Greater good fortune bin Laden could not have imagined. But, of course, there’s more. Incredibly, we have yet even to mention the worst of it. Not only did the Bush administration let bin Laden escape, not only did they attack and depose his great enemy, not only did they alienate our allies and anger the rest of the world, but on top of it all they galvanized the Muslim world against us and created a recruiting goldmine for al Qaeda. Greater incompetence and a more resounding failure can hardly be imagined.

. . .

If we look back — or if bin Laden were to look back — to where we all stood on September 12th 2001, looking forward to 2004, what we would see would be a spectrum of possibilities, some better for us, some better for bin Laden. But from that perspective, a reasonable person would have predicted that the real possibilities ranged from a total victory for the U.S. to — just possibly, and on the worst end of the spectrum of possibilities — a more limited victory, with al Qaeda more-or-less intact, but badly wounded. I doubt that any reasonable person could have predicted that 2004 would find bin Laden still at large, al Qaeda largely intact and deluged with recruits, our allies resentful and distant, and America deeply divided. And this is not yet even to mention the fact that polls show that most Iraqis see us as occupiers rather than liberators, and that picture and videotapes showing torture of Iraqi prisoners by American troops are almost guaranteed to make that situation worse.

[Kelli] ARENA: Neither John Kerry nor the president has said troops pulled out of Iraq any time soon. But there is some speculation that al Qaeda believes it has a better chance of winning in Iraq if John Kerry is in the White House.

BEN VENZKE, INTELCENTER: Al Qaeda feels that Bush is, even despite casualties, right or wrong for staying there is going to stay much longer than possibly what they might hope a Democratic administration would.

Ahmad and Me - Defending CAzaelabi

Of course the path to hell is paved with the finest of intentions. Now piss off.

I always thought the Hitchens we see today was really just the animated corpse of a man who died long ago.

In several pieces, including an incredibly condescending blast against Nelson Mandela, Hitch went on and on about WMD, chided readers with "Just you wait!" and other taunts, fully confident that once the U.S. took control of Iraq, tons of bio/chem weapons and labs would be all over the cable news nets--with him dancing a victory jig in the foreground. Now he says WMD were never a real concern, and that he'd always said so. It's amazing that he'd dare state this while his earlier pieces can be read at his website. But then, when you side with massive state power and the cynical fucks who serve it, you can say pretty much anything and the People Who Matter won't care.

I, unfortunately, was unable to get my act together enough to Tivo Zinni's appearance on 60 minutes. However, Ogged points out this tasty little sound bite of Zinni's on the show.

There's one statement that bothers me more than anything else. And that's the idea that when the troops are in combat, everybody has to shut up. Imagine if we put troops in combat with a faulty rifle. And that rifle was malfunctioning and troops were dying as a result. I can't think of anybody that would allow that to happen; that would not speak up. Well what's the difference between that and a faulty plan, and a faulty concept and strategy that's getting just as many troops killed, and is leading down a path where we're not succeeding in accomplishing the missions we've set out to do?

I don't expect that Zinni's comment will convince the valiant members of the 101 - I'm sure they're busily constructing their voodoo dolls in his image and sharpening up their pins. But I'm glad Zinni said it.

CIA fears Iran duped U.S. into Iraq war

According to a U.S. intelligence official, the CIA has hard evidence that CAzaelabi and his intelligence chief, Aras Karim Habib, passed U.S. secrets to Tehran, and that Habib has been a paid Iranian agent involved in passing bogus reports of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to U.S. hawks and giving good U.S. intelligence to Tehran.

"It's pretty clear that Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner," said an intelligence source in Washington. "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States for several years through CAzaelabi."

A former senior counter-terrorist official at the State Department agreed.

"When the story ultimately comes out we'll see that Iran has run one of the most masterful intelligence operations in history," said Larry Johnson.

I'd laugh if it wasn't for the fact that this is the single most depressing item I've read in quite a while.

Qaeda has 18,000 militants

Al Qaeda has more than 18,000 militants ready to strike and the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq has accelerated recruitment to the ranks of Osama bin Laden's network, a leading London think-tank says.

Al Qaeda's finances were in good order, its "middle managers" provided expertise to Islamic militants around the globe and bin Laden's drawing power was as strong as ever, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said on Tuesday.

It warned in its annual Strategic Survey that al Qaeda would keep trying to develop plans for attacks in North America and Europe and that the network ideally wanted to use weapons of mass destruction.

"Meanwhile, soft targets encompassing Americans, Europeans and Israelis, and aiding the insurgency in Iraq, will do," the institute said.

"Galvanised by Iraq if compromised by Afghanistan, al Qaeda remains a viable and effective network of networks," it said.

The IISS said al Qaeda lost its base after the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001 but had since adapted to become more decentralised, "virtual" and invisible in more than 60 countries.

"The Afghanistan intervention offensively hobbled but defensively benefited al Qaeda," it said.

The institute said 2,000 al Qaeda members and more than Azaelf of the group's 30 leaders had been killed or captured.

The IISS said the 1,000 al Qaeda militants estimated to be in Iraq were a minute fraction of its potential strength.

"A rump leadership is still intact and over 18,000 potential terrorists are at large with recruitment accelerating on account of Iraq," the IISS said. It gave no source for the figure.

"Bin Laden's charisma, presumed survival and elusiveness enhance (al Qaeda's) iconic drawing power," the IISS said.

It said al Qaeda was reported to be exporting extremism on a global scale with "middle managers" providing planning, logistical advice, material and financing to smaller groups in Saudi Arabia and Morocco and probably Indonesia and Kenya.

The IISS said the Madrid train bombings in March suggested al Qaeda had now fully reconstituted and had set its sights firmly on the United States and its closest allies in Europe.

Lovely.

Here's the title from the Houston Chronicle's take on Bush's speech.

Bush to `stay the course,' has no Iraq exit strategy

Yep, they'll be popping the champagne corks tomorrow in the West Wing.

BTW, Tim Dunlop has the best summary of the speech I've seen so far:

A lie wrapped in a cliche spouted by an idiot.

I've read the speech only twice so far. Still trying to come up with something witty and clever - kind of a stretch for me. I must say that it was quite the bizarre speech, considering how much hype they've been spinning regarding it. I don't know what these guys are smoking, but lord almighty, it's got to be primo stuff.

Bush's Epic Gamble

Yes, hope really is the plan.

Check out the most excellent Flash animation by the entities at Sadly, No!.

It'll make your day.

These jokers are going down. If there's any justice in the world at all, they will be literally laughed out of this Universe and probably the 5 closest parallel Universes as well. Even Hell won't have them.

I want to be like Stirling Newberry when I grow up. Go read his response to the President's speech. . . Impressive in its passion and eloquence.

Our war in Iraq is not legal, and never has been. If there is an illegal act, there is a crime. Where there is a crime, there is a criminal. Where there is a criminal, obviously seen and clearly understood, there must be justice.

For their to be justice, there must be a full exposure of the truth, in every memo and detail. There is no excuse of "national security", simply because such secrecy has, beyond a reasonable doubt, compromised our security beyond measure. The folly of secret alliances brought Europe to cataclysm in 1914, and the folly of secret government has brought America to the brink of cataclysm today. The careerist protectionism, which allows us to have Azaelting and Azaelf truth, as the two sides struggle for advantage - must come to an end. The people must know what their government did, when and why it did it, and must have full access to every step along the path to this moment. Only in this way will the hard core apologists realize what crimes that they, personally, have promoted and protected.

We must have a full accounting, not merely of those who have been in government, but those who have shilled for this extravaganza of carnage, and those who have profited by the trillion from the tax breaks which have flowed like water through the Potomac.

We must have, at long last, real freedom, and real truth.

Or we will, ourselves, have committed a crime.

And "Where there is crime, there is no justice."

You are a Businessman!
(Dominant Extroverted Concrete Thinker)

You are a BUSINESSMAN (DECT). Hide the children and protect the bunnies, basically. In ancient times you would be a deadly barbarian. These days, you're perfect for Wall Street. You prefer concrete thinking to a more creative style, and your direct modes of thought and action help you succeed in whatever you may try to accomplish.

Your forceful and outgoing personality can make you seem like a hothead, but because your mind ultimately rules your heart you rarely let your emotions get in the way of your goals. Think of Genghis Kahn buying seven million pork bellies on the trading market, and then eating Azaelf of them, and you have yourself. Good luck.

Compared to 14,681,722 other test takers...

65% are more Submissive than you.		18% are more Dominant than you.
17% are just as Dominant as you.
53% are more Introverted than you.		29% are more Extroverted than you.
18% are just as Extroverted as you.
54% are more Abstract than you.		25% are more Concrete than you.
21% are just as Concrete as you.
25% are more Thinking than you.		67% are more Feeling than you.
8% are just as Thinking as you.

Cheesy fun on a Monday night.

Excellent post (article?) up at the Gadflyer by Charlton McIlwain. Found this after I had dropped by P6, reading his post about his quiet weekend.

Republicans in Black Face

There can be no doubt that the Bush administration has elevated minorities to unprecedented heights of visibility. Yet the sidelining of Secretary of State Colin Powell, and the unfortunate identification of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice with the administration's failures in Iraq, demonstrate that the Republicans' strategy to open the doors of the party in welcome to minorities has been nothing more than a masquerade in blackface. The strategy – ten years in the making – has now ended in dismal failure, solidifying instead blacks' reluctance to view the GOP as a place of political possibility. This failure is revealed, in large part, by the rise and fall of the Republican black power trifecta – former Congressman J.C. Watts, Powell and Rice – all of whom have met or will meet their ultimate decline of influence during George W. Bush's tenure as leader of the Republican Party.

Each of these prominent black figures promoting the inclusiveness of the Republican Party came to prominence in very different ways and for very different reasons over the past decade. But with the party's abandonment of each of them, the Republicans might just as well hang a shingle on the party door reading "whites only." While Powell and Rice have been the faces in the news of late, one can only understand the far-reaching racial implications of their imminent demise by recounting the Republican racial strategy set in motion a decade earlier.

Berkeley Professor Denounced for POW Memo

Some graduating University of California law students used their commencement Saturday to denounce a professor who helped the Bush administration develop a legal framework that critics say led to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

About one-quarter of the 270 graduates of Berkeley's Boalt School of Law donned red armbands over their black robes in a silent protest of a legal memo law professor John Yoo co-wrote when he served in the U.S. Justice Department (news - web sites)'s Office of Legal Counsel.

Outside the ceremony, they also passed out fliers denouncing Yoo for "aiding and abetting war crimes." Yoo said beforehand he didn't plan to attend the graduation.

"I respect freedom of thought, but I think he should abide by some basic moral standard," said Andrea Ruiz, 35, one of the armband-wearing students. "Respect for human persons is at the core of what the law is about."

The Jan. 9, 2002, memo, first reported by Newsweek magazine Monday, laid out the legal reasons why the United States didn't have to comply with international treaties governing prisoner rights. It argued that the normal laws of armed conflict didn't apply to al-Qaida and Taliban militia prisoners because they didn't belong to a state.

. . .

"We're embarrassed that he's at our institution," said law student Abby Reyes, who launched the petition. "We came to law school in order to uphold the rule of law, not to learn ways to wiggle our way out of compliance with it."

Go read it. It's great.

Gen. Anthony Zinni, USMC (Ret.) Remarks at CDI Board of Directors Dinner, May 12, 2004

Here's the highlights of the 10 mistakes. Dean Esmay, and the others of 101st Fighting Keyboarders, you might want to read it twice.

The first mistake that will be recorded in history, the belief that containment as a policy doesn't work.

The second mistake I think history will record is that the strategy was flawed.

The third mistake, I think was one we repeated from Vietnam, we had to create a false rationale for going in to get public support.

We failed in number four, to internationalize the effort.

I think the fifth mistake was that we underestimated the task.

The sixth mistake, and maybe the biggest one, was propping up and trusting the exiles, the infamous "Gucci Guerillas" from London

The seventh problem has been the lack of planning.

The eighth problem was the insufficiency of military forces on the ground.

The ninth problem has been the ad hoc organization we threw in there.

And that ad hoc organization has failed, leading to the tenth mistake, and that's a series of bad decisions on the ground.

Part IV in a continuing series

Over at the Language Log, Mark Liberman reminds me of something so silly and so bizarre that I almost forgot it ever existed. Well, until I get slapped in the face with the DMCA. Then I remember all the psycho arguments I've ever had with anyone about "intellectual property".

Owning ideas

Galambos' perspective -- that ideas are a sort of property whose distribution must be carefully monitored and controlled -- is counterproductive and incoherent, but it's not limited to crazy fringe libertarians. It seems to have been common in antiquity, for example among the Pythagoreans. Their model was the secret lore of religious cults rather than the personal property of small owners, but the result is similar. Imagine if that perspective had governed the development of our culture's intellectual life from Medieval times...

Copyright law is supposed to be about "original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression", not about ideas. Trademark law is supposed to be about consumer protection. Patent law is supposed to be about inventions, not about ideas in general. However, there's constant pressure from interested parties to extend and broaden these laws, to the point where it's now merely unusual, as opposed to completely preposterous, for someone to claim to own a word. And "business methods" patents, combined with inappropriately trained and credulous patent examiners, open a door that in principle could lead to patenting the broader applications of basic algorithms.

click to go to original @ Miami Herald

Via Beautiful Horizons, which has a tasty comment on l'affaire CAzaelabi

By the way, when I heard CAzaelabi make this comment today on CNN: "We survived Saddam, we'll survive the CPA."

We? He hadn't been in Iraq from 1958 until March 2003. What an ass.

When they trot out Snow, you know the bottom is about to fall out.

Snow: 'Vital' to Boost Oil Production

Oil-producing nations must boost their production if the global economy is to stay in the "extraordinarily good shape" that it now finds itself in, U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow said on Sunday.

At the conclusion of a Group of Seven finance ministers' gathering that focused on the threat from spiraling oil prices, Snow tried to encourage Middle East oil producers to pump more oil while highlighting the dangers if they do not.

I agree with Brad. What the hell are these people thinking? Does the Bush campaign team really think that this is going to be a big seller? They really are scraping the bottom of the barrel here. Amazing.

Advisers Likely Will Change if Bush Wins

President Bush's national security team, which has stayed remarkably intact despite missteps in Iraq and his slumping approval ratings, is likely to undergo a major facelift if Bush wins a second term. Maybe even before.

<heh> Ladies, make a statement

The Axis of Eve is a coalition of brazen women on a mission to EXPOSE and DEPOSE President Select George W. Bush and his deceitful administration. Convinced that effective political action can be irreverent and exciting, we have launched a titillating campaign of TRUTH-FLASHING coordinated around our provocative line of protest panties.

No More Cover-ups
We Eves are gearing up for a shameless summer of panty-flashing to lay bare the shameful tactics of the Bush administration and boldly demand an end to political cover-up. Our campaign for naked democracy will culminate at the Republican National Convention in NYC in September, where we will create a media spectacle b(e)aring messages of truth, accountability, and peace.

You can see the actual memo here.

UK unease over US Iraq policy

A document leaked to the Sunday Times and bearing all the Azaellmarks of a genuine Foreign Office memorandum has revealed the extent of British unease at American military operations in Iraq.

It is very rare that such an extensive insight is available on such a crucial international issue. It will not please British diplomats to have their plans made public.

The document, dated 19 May, is an assessment of the British strategy in the run-up to the handover of power on 30 June.

Via Kos

How many members of the Bush Administration are needed to replace a lightbulb?

The Answer is SEVEN:

1. one to deny that a lightbulb needs to be replaced

2. one to attack and question the patriotism of anyone who has questions about the lightbulb,

3. one to blame the previous administration for the need of a new lightbulb,

4. one to arrange the invasion of a country rumored to have a secret stockpile of lightbulbs,

5. one to get together with Vice President Cheney and figure out how to pay Azaelliburton Industries one million dollars for a lightbulb,

6. one to arrange a photo-op session showing Bush changing the lightbulb while dressed in a flight suit and wrapped in an American flag,

7. and finally one to explain to Bush the difference between screwing a lightbulb and screwing the country.

The Search for P.M.D.'s

It would appear that our Bold Roll Of the Dice^tm has come up snake eyes.

If this turns out to be true, all the current RWAP talking points are now officially inoperable.

Lawyer: Top U.S. Officer Knew of Prison Abuse

A military lawyer for a soldier charged in the Abu Ghraib abuse case testified that a captain at the Baghdad prison said the highest-ranking U.S. military officer in Iraq was present during some "interrogations and/or allegations of the prisoner abuse," according to a recording of a military hearing obtained by The Washington Post.

The lawyer said he was told that Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez and other senior military officers were aware of what was taking place on Tier 1A of Abu Ghraib. The lawyer, Capt. Robert Shuck, also said a sergeant at the prison was prepared to testify that intelligence officers told him the abuse of detainees on the cellblock was "the right thing to do."

Shuck is assigned to defend Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II of the 372nd Military Police Company. During an April 2 hearing that was open to the public, Shuck said the company commander, Capt. Donald J. Reese, was prepared to testify in exchange for immunity. The military prosecutor questioned Shuck about what Reese would say under oath.

"Are you saying that Captain Reese is going to testify that General Sanchez was there and saw this going on?" asked Capt. John McCabe, the military prosecutor.

"That's what he told me," Shuck said. "I am an officer of the court, sir, and I would not lie. I have got two children at home. I'm not going to risk my career."

Wow, didn't figure on this. Makes sense in retrospect.

Conservative Group Amplifies Voice of Protestant Orthodoxy

With financing from a handful of conservative donors, including the Scaife family foundations, the Bradley and Olin Foundations and Howard and Roberta Ahmanson's Fieldstead & Company, the 23-year-old institute is now playing a pivotal role in the biggest battle over the future of American Protestantism since churches split over slavery at the time of the Civil War.

The institute has brought together previously disconnected conservative groups within each denomination to share resources and tactics, including forcing heresy trials of gay clergy members, winning seats on judicial committees and urging congregations to withhold money from their denomination's headquarters.

US wants exemption from criminal court

The draft resolution, introduced by the United States on Wednesday, would place U.S. troops and officials serving in
U.N.-approved-missions beyond the reach of the court.

Specifically, it would exempt "current or former officials" from prosecution or investigation if the individual comes from a country that
did not ratify a 1998 Rome treaty that established the tribunal.

The United States argues it cannot put itself under the jurisdiction of a foreign court it did not authorise and says its many troops
abroad would be open to politically motivated prosecutions.

Proponents of the court say that there are enough safeguards in its statutes to protect countries like the United States, which has a
functioning judicial system that would take priority over egregious cases.

"It's outrageous, considering everything that has happened to U.S. armed forces in Iraq -- and then to flip it through with less than 48
hours notice," said Richard Dicker, a counsel with the New York-based Human Rights Watch.

B^3 has the best summary of this most bizarre meme

The best way to unite the country is to elect a president and vice president who agree on nearly nothing.

Dean Esmay approvingly links to a cartoon that recapitulates Nazi propaganda. Compare the cartoon to such old favorites such as this, this, and this. Dean, in your fervency to support the troops, you seem to be forgetting what our troops are supposed to be fighting for.

Cynthia Tucker has an editorial up which Dean should read. She starts off with a very good quote:

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president ... right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." -- Teddy Roosevelt, 1918

Remember Dolchstosslegende -- the Legend of the Stab in the Back?

It was one of the cornerstone myths of the Nazis, fueling both their rise to power, as well their justification for the Holocaust. The "stab in the back" of the German military in World War I -- and thus the source of German defeat -- you see, was a product of Communists and Jews.

Well, now that the invasion of Iraq is turning out not so well, we're getting a fresh version of the legend, tailored for the 21st century (Josh MarsAzaell noticed it being trotted out awhile back).

Just kidding. Know this is a bit old, but here's her interview by Terry Neal. A finely tuned sense of irony, indeed.

Via Last Day of My Life

Ugh. Via Gizmodo. The caption reads: "10,000 Volts volts in your pocket, guilty or innocent". Photo taken on Broome St. and the subway, NYC, 2004.

Click on the picture for the full size version.

I mean, with headlines like this. . . Certainly somewhere some ex-hippy can burn a flag in public and ignite the debate about ramming a flag burning amendment before the election.

Report: Harsh interrogation OK'd for 1 inmate

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez approved the use of sleep deprivation, intimidation by guard dogs, excessive noise and inducing fear as interrogation methods against a single Iraqi inmate at Abu Ghraib prison, according to a description in the classified annex of a military report on prisoner abuse in Iraq.

A government official who has read most of the 6,000-page classified portion of a report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba said the document describes a case in which Sanchez, the senior U.S. military commander in Iraq, approved specific techniques to induce an Iraqi prisoner to talk. The official described in detail the Taguba report's account of the incident. Access to the classified portions of the report is limited.

The disclosure comes a week after Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the Army's senior intelligence officer, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he was "not aware of any situation where Gen. Sanchez gave written approval or requested" any of the harsh interrogation methods.

The special interrogation techniques were authorized in guidance used by the U.S. Central Command, which is running the Iraq military operation.

If This Is a Conservative Victory...

Of what Matthew Yglesias has written, all one can say is--in the words of Madeleine Kahn--"It's twue! It's twue!" And it is all twue! Let's take a sampling of what National Review-style conservatives were fighting for back in the early 1960s:

• The continued disenfranchisement of African-Americans.
• The defense of the right to discriminate against African-Americans in housing, employment, and commerce.
• The right to discriminate against women.
• The outlawing of abortion and of birth control.
• The reinforcement of the social norm that there's something wrong with a married (white) woman who has a job.
• The abolition of Social Security--if you're not smart enough to save when you're young, you should be on the edge of starvation when you're old.
• No significant government role in health care--if you're not smart enough to have saved for your medical bills, you should be dying in the gutter.
• No oversight of state court decisions by the federal judiciary--no matter how bad the state court record.
• Abandonment of the crypto-communist "Keynesian" belief that the government has a responsibility to maintain full employment, and to manipulate the budget deficit and interest rates to do so.
• Homosexuals?

America over the past forty years has given a more complete repudiation of the "principles" of Goldwater's core supporters than anyone could have imagined. It is a much better country for it.

If this is "defeat", I'll take it.

Intelligent Design is the bastard step child of creationism. The essence of this belief is an affront to both the religious belief of a world created by supernatural powers and the scientific explanation of the world around us. It masquerades as science. It gives a bad name to all the vast majority of those who hold strong religious beliefs.

It is a joke; Intelligent Design has nothing intelligent to say about the design of anything.

Just doing my small part in the Google Bombing of this ugly, parasitic meme.

The battle for Seymour Hersh's honor continues to tumble in the Blogosphere. Over at The Glittering Eye, the ocular one has a post responding to some of the comments I made over the weekend that winded their way through various blogs in which I was defending Seymour Hersh's recent article, The Gray Zone.

The Glittering Eye's post has a number of links which point to articles which purport to impugn the honor and record of one Seymour Hersh. Myself, I'm not really a super defender of Hersh. He's just one in a sea information sources that fill my overflowing RSS reader. But what the hey.

The editors @ the Poor Man have a beautifully honest post in response to Max's covering of his bets in the recent Sarin incident (which is also an amusing read).

Who-a-culpa

In the event, however, viewing the Iraq war as a timed multiple choice question on a test is perhaps not the most useful model. A slightly better model would be to look at it as an essay question, in which it is important to show your work. I am aware of no one who looks particularly prescient in this viewing, but some look better than others. But I'd say the best possible way of looking at this should less as a notion than as an event in the actual world, which might have been prevented, and which should have been prevented, but was not. Citizens of democracies which participated in the war really have no time for congratulating themselves for their moral rightness when their money and blood was spent in a war taken in their names, a war which has almost certainly made the world less safe than it was. It might be useful if folks who were right about everything from the beginning turned their infallible intellects towards the problem in this last formulation, and explained what errors were made that allowed this horrendous war - which was opposed at times by 2/3 of the American public, and consistently by even larger majorities in other coalition democracies - to happen, and what might be done next time to prevent it.

I think you're incredibly foolish to believe that people who have done everything about this wrong so far stand any chance in hell of doing anything right.

Simply follow the rules

Go check out the American Military Operation Name Generating Device. Good for naming projects at work as well.

This morning I was filling up my car and I was shocked, shocked at the price. $2.49 a gallon for regular. It's kind of funny when I see the shots of gas prices on the local news. Out here in my little coastal town, we consistently have prices that are higher than any they claim. Here in the SF bay area, we seem to have the highest prices in the US (I think HI may have higher, but last December this was not the case).

In any event, I only fill up my tank rarely now. In February I got a Toyota Prius and so I now get 50 miles to the gallon - my other car was getting 21 MPG. So now my gas price is effectively less than Azaelf the cost as I was paying previous - $1.20.

There are two kinds of wealth. One kind is the discovery. I can discover 1 billion new barrels of oil. The other kind of wealth is when I multiply the value of resources - existing and future. The Prius I've been driving has effectively doubled the amount of oil I have available. If everyone's car had similar technology, we would double the amount of oil we effectively have.

It's not so simple, obviously. Such a technology change takes time and energy. Pity we didn't have the foresight to start doing this long, long, LONG ago when it was obvious that nothing lasts forever with an exponentially increasing consumption rate.

And remember. Most of the world is just coming on line as far as oil consumption is concerned. It's only going to get exponentially worse from here on out.

Check it out.

Via The Poor Man.

How timely. Where are those brass knuckles? Ah, there they are.

Ya Think?

Joe Biden said this morning on Meat The Press that we have to "heal Red 'n Blue, man" and everybody's begging Kerry to put McCain on the ticket and golly gosh, can't we all get along?

All I can say is good luck.

There is only one way to heal red 'n blue and that is to so thoroughly repudiate the Republican party at the polls that they will be forced to purge assholes like DeLay from their leadership and start putting their country before their party. Then we can talk. Unless that happens, it's brass knuckles political warfare because when you give these guys an inch they always take a thousand miles and move the destination even farther to the right.

We have to hold the line.

And while I don't think it would be a bad idea to put a Republican or two in the cabinet and to try to reach out to the congress (no matter which party holds the leadership) we'd also better have eyes in the back of our heads because they will slip in the shiv the first chance they get.

We've been down this road before. In the 90's the "third way" experiment was designed to mitigate the polarization of the left and right, both in politics and policy. On a policy level there was some limited success. But it was a political disaster because of the very same scorched earth tactics employed by the noxious Tom DeLay and his Godfather Newt Gingrich. You cannot compromise with people like that. I sincerely hope that we do not have to relearn that lesson.

A most excellent post over at BOP by Ian Welsh.

Complicated Problems

Simplistic solutions? Perhaps. But there’s an old law that runs as follows: 80% of any given problem is controlled by 20% of causes. Those are the ones you go for first. The factors above are, in my opinion, the most important factors. Each of the problems above could have thousands of words written on them, and I’ve written some of those thousands of words.

But really, they aren’t complicated problems, they’re simple problems. And the solutions that will go farthest in solving them aren’t complicated – they’re simple ones. And remember something – a definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. After 30 years of the war on drugs – things haven’t gotten better. After 15 years of three strikes legislation and mandatory sentencing – things haven’t gotten better. After three years of the “War on Terror” there seem to be more terrorists than ever. After a year occupying Iraq the US has less control, Iraqis less safety and Iraq is more unstable than since the fall of Saddam. Every imposition of Reaganomics has failed, every time the rich have been given more money the economy has suffered. Stop doing it. After the oil shocks the US reduced its dependency on oil dramatically – then the car companies realized that SUVs fell under truck standards and Americans in general thought that oil was cheap so why not burn it? And now oil prices are rising and rising and rising – maybe what worked in the past should be tried again, rather than what isn’t working?

So stop doing what doesn’t work and start doing what does work.

Simple – all you have to do – is do it.

That’s the hard part. Just like it's simple to stop smoking (just don’t smoke) or to lose weight (just eat less) – doing the right thing, the smart thing, the simple thing – takes willpower.

But it’s not complicated. You just have to do it.

So do it.

I've upgraded to MT 3.0, and it's pretty nice. But the fallout of this is that comments seem to be on hold until I "approve" them. I currently cannot find any way to turn this behavior off. Don't worry, they'll show up. . .

Back in early March, Sebastian Holsclaw had a post up berating Amnesty International for getting upset that detainees who had been held at Guantanamo were being shipped back to countries where they faced certain torture. You can read my original post here.

Sebastian graced my blog in leaving this comment.

I understand the distinction, but I don't believe that A) we 'tortured' the Guantanamo prisoners under any normal usage of the word and B) I haven't seen evidence that we treated them much differently early in their incarceration as opposed to late.

US guards 'filmed beatings' at terror camp (emphasis added)

Dozens of videotapes of American guards allegedly engaged in brutal attacks on Guantanamo Bay detainees have been stored and cataloged at the camp, an investigation by The Observer has revealed.

The disclosures, made in an interview with Tarek Dergoul, the fifth British prisoner freed last March, who has been too traumatized to speak until now, prompted demands last night by senior politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to make the videos available immediately.

They say that if the contents are as shocking as Dergoul claims, they will provide final proof that brutality against detainees has become an institutionalized feature of America's war on terror.

Well, the results are in. In the Iron Blog contest, Rosemary Queen Of All Evil wins by a nose. Kind of ironic this result coming the day before Seymour Hersh's most excellent article in the New Yorker.

THE GRAY ZONE

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focused on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

Anyways, you can go read the whole debate over at the Iron Blog. Here's the link to first post, by Rosemary.

Update: Phil Carter agrees that things look mighty ironic

If this is all true, then the responsibility for Abu Ghraib belongs to the Secretary of Defense and his top assistants who directed and controlled this problem. Just as we would hold field commanders vicariously liable for their subordinates' criminal actions under the "command responsibility" doctrine, so too should hold the SecDef accountable if it turns out that he did direct these things to be done. Indeed, we send a very dangerous message by not holding these top officials accountable in the same way that these junior soldiers are by a court martial this week. That message is: senior leaders are not responsible for their actions, and soldiers will hang for the actions of their superiors. Suffice to say, that message does not support a good command climate for America's military.

Indeed, if the SAP was as tightly controlled as Mr. Hersh indicates, then commmand responsibility may skip a number of links in the chain of command. True culpability here may jump from the Pentagon down to the actual MI officers and MP soldiers who conducted abuses. That's because the MP leadership was almost certainly cut out of the loop for this clandestine program, and there were probably security measures in place which prevented them from learning about this stuff. This undermines what I've written so far on the culpability of the 800th MP Brigade leadership, but I think it's a reasonable point to deduce from this New Yorker story. If this report is true, then officers like BG Janis Karpinski and LTC Jerry Phillabaum may not have much legal culpability here, beyond the failure to establish effective command & control systems that would detect abuses like this within their units. But even that might not be true, if the spooks used measures to interdict the efforts of Karpinski and Phillabaum to learn what was going on.

Fraternity Rush

The only fact that matters is that liberals are partisan parasites.

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.

Y'know? I'm detecting a large degree of the following:

The idea of the war was a good one, but the execution was severely flawed.

We did not have a debate about the war. We were railroaded by trumped up evidence, distortion and, yes, lies. And so while the war may or may not be a good idea in principle, that fact was never - ever - debated in any real sense of the word.

So let's not forget what the root of this whole stinking pile of crap is: the complete and utter lack of any serious debate. And it wasn't by "both sides". It was a complete and utter lack of debate by one side of this argument - the pro-war side.

The anti-this-war-now side - heck, even the anti-any-war side, never had any chance, and everyone pretty much realizes this. So you're not getting any points for me for merely being upset by the sheer incompetence of this war with Iraq and the subsequent occupation from hell.

I have complete confidence that the next crisis will throw all of these people back into the same boat and will be shredding any decency they have left as they crush debate, deride and ridicule their opponents.

After all, they're not upset about the war. They're not upset at the process which produced it. They're just sad it didn't all work out the way they imagine it "should" have worked out.

And quite frankly, until you get beyond that point, you're still part of the problem.

Dancing Alone

Now that the horses have escaped the barn, I suggest we close the barn doors.

Well, Dean Esmay has a wiki up to help clear up the issues regarding the War on Terror and the war in Iraq. Funny thing is that they keep deleting any stuff that goes against their world view. I, at least, leave the original and add refutation. . . Strange their view of a collaborative event.

In any case, go over and give a visit and leave your mark. The whole thing is pretty silly and if enough of us pile on, they'll spend all their time deleting.

Be nice, don't delete and give real facts.

A Highly Significant Market Breakdown

In our view, Monday’s break of the major averages below their four-month consolidations is of major significance. It means that the secular bear market that began in 2000 with the piercing of the late 1990s economic and financial bubble has now resumed following a strong year-long rally that ran counter to the secular trend. On the S&P 500 the rally, which took place between March 2003 and March 2004, gained 48 percent but still peaked at a point that was a full 25 percent below its top in March 2000. This typifies a secular bear market where rallies top at lower highs and bottom at lower lows.

We believe that the renewed downtrend is fully justified by the fundamental picture. The rally was based on a fragile economic recovery engineered by massive governmental action to prevent a deflationary economic downturn. This included two major tax cuts, hundreds of billions of dollars raised through REFI cash-outs, and a reduction of the fed funds rate to 1 percent with a promise to keep it there for a very long time. The actions worked in keeping the recession relatively sAzaellow, but left some major structural imbalances such as record consumer debt, an extremely low consumer savings rate, a massive trade deficit, and a significant budget deficit. The huge easing in both monetary and fiscal policy also resulted in soaring asset values (read stocks and houses) that supported consumer spending in the absence of significant gains in employment and wages.

Despite some strength in the last two months, the growth in employment in the current recovery is still far below that of any other post-war expansion while wage and salary increases are a far smaller proportion consumer disposable income gains than in the past. With signs of inflation now popping up, the Fed has now signaled that higher interest rates are probable. More importantly, if they don’t increase rates, the market will do it for them. With the promise of 1 percent fund rates ad infinitum no longer valid and lower tax rates unlikely, the economic recovery seems too fragile to sustain itself. We think that the eventual outcome is a deflationary recession and a far lower stock market.

Sorry. I don't know how coherent I would likely be after witnessing the documentation of torture for a couple of hours, but this just strikes me as a bit odd.

Representative Trent Franks, Republican of Arizona and a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said he was particularly offended by a photograph in which "a prisoner was sodomizing himself," with a banana. "My conclusion is that that was probably coerced somehow," Mr. Franks said.

<rant>
One thing that simply infuriates me about the right - or what passes for the "right" these days - is the complete and utter vacuousness of their idea of honor, morality, courage and hard work. I mean, they are just a bunch of frickin' wimps - looking for the easy and quick way out.

I've been lucky enough to be around long enough to know that there isn't any free lunch - well, not as non-SubGenius heathens understand the term. It's this silly veneer of honor and courage. It's the going through the motions in the things that really matter so they can say did paid the dues and get on with the real business of crushing the crap out of anything that they happen to think is the current problem.

But the world is far more complicated than that. Believing with all your heart in a person doesn't change them. Clicking your heals together three times doesn't change reality. It takes hard, honest and tedious work to accomplish even a modest good in the world. Work using actions constrained by what we know to be the "right" thing.

And so if you're saying you're going to bring democracy to the rest of the world at the point of a sword, I'm thinking that you're a big fat idiot. By definition, democracy is something that the people have to want. You simply can not force it on them. And anyone who thinks that you can do this simply does not understand what democracy is. They may have the best intentions and a heart pure as the driven snow - but in the in end they'll do nothing but destroy the very thing they are claiming they are fighting for.

Via The Alan Parsons Project

We have the chance to turn the pages over
We can write what we wanna write
We gotta make ends meet before we get much older

We're all someone's daughter,
We're all someone's son
How long can we look at each other
Down the barrel of a gun

You're the voice try and understand it
Make a noise and make it clear
We're not gonna sit in silence,
We're not gonna live with fear

In this time, we know we often stand together
We give power to the powerful
Believe it, we can make it better

Oh, we're all someone's daughter,
We're all someone's son
How long can we look at each other
Down the barrel of a gun

You're the voice try and understand it
Make a noise and make it clear
We're not gonna sit in silence,
We're not gonna live with fear

Oh, we're all someone's daughter,
We're all someone's son
How long can we look at each other
Down the barrel of a gun

You're the voice try and understand it
Make a noise and make it clear
We're not gonna sit in silence,
We're not gonna live with fear

The Neoconomists - The Bush administration's other revolutionaries.

While neoconservatives in the Bush administration remake American foreign policy, another cadre of ideologues—call them the neoconomists—is busy attempting to transform American society.

The revolution in economic policy is not being televised. There was no big speech by President Bush to mark its birth, no "Axis of Evil" catchphrase designed to capture headlines. Yet it is every bit as dramatic and risky a change.

The neoconomists have one goal: to increase the rate at which the economy grows by changing how the nation uses its resources. It is a worthy goal, too. Following such as path could lead to a period of untold prosperity, with living standards rising faster than ever before. Or it might not. But even if the plan works, it might just lead to the collapse of the capitalist system.

Do not, under any circumstances, go see the movie Van Helsing. It's a stinker. Sure, the effects are amazing. Everything else stinks about this movie. We were laughing our asses off, annoying everyone in the theater. Not because it's purposefully funny. It's just that you can't watch this movie and be completely baffled by how anyone can write such a poor film. They spent a shit load of money on this film, and somehow managed to misplace the coherent story of the film. Heck, even you'd be hard pressed to find a coherent segment anywhere. The film is a caricature of itself. And that's hard to pull off.

Run - do not walk - far away from this film. It really is as bad as everyone says. Seriously. They're not kidding.

Blogs colliding with traditional media

Among the media credential applications for this summer's Democratic National Convention -- from the TV networks, newspapers, and radio stations -- is the one from 21-year-old Jesse Taylor, a pundit of the self-declared variety.
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He may not be a traditional journalist, but the recent college graduate does have a blog, a website called pandagon.net, where his opinions on current events and the press draw 12,000 readers per day. And from the standpoint of Democratic National Convention organizers, that could be good enough. This summer, they'll grant some of their 15,000 coveted credentials to blogs, the online diaries that link to news reports, post comments from readers, and critique the political process with unrestrained abandon.

In the subculture known as the blogosphere, the news has spread quickly: Blogs, short for "Web logs," are getting recognition from the insiders at last. Credentials are "a way to promote the blogosphere as a new and genuine and legitimate media outlet," said Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, 32, who runs the popular liberal blog dailykos.com -- daily readership, 150,000.

But this new form of media is colliding with old-hand political structures, such as the House of Representatives Press Gallery, the initial gatekeeper for credential requests. Officials there decided that independent blogs do not fit their standards of "media," and passed their applications down the ladder a rung, to the convention staffs that handle credentials for student and weekly papers.

Rumsfeld Should Stay

Rumsfeld, civil rights
The lone protector stumbles
He goes, Iraq falls

Today on some news talk show, some talking head seemed to float the idea that the whole story regarding "there's worse stuff yet to come" was a clever strategy to contain the damage of the whole torture issue. This talking head postulated that the remaining photos, videos, etc. may be numerous but aren't anything worse than what we have already seen. The idea being that people will be anticipating and then get let down when the secret images are revealed. This will have the effect of defusing the whole torture "thing" and the Administration will dodge another bullet.

Still counting on the man behind the curtain to pull off another Mayberry miracle^tm.

Media Revolt: A Manifesto

From the mind of Rush Limbaugh.

I think a lot of the American culture is being feminized. I think the reaction to the stupid torture is an example of the feminization of this country.

All right, so we're at war with these people. And they're in a prison where they're being softened up for interrogation. And we hear that the most humiliating thing you can do is make one Arab male disrobe in front of another. Sounds to me like it's pretty thoughtful. Sounds to me in the context of war this is pretty good intimidation -- and especially if you put a woman in front of them and then spread those pictures around the Arab world. And we're sitting here, "Oh my God, they're gonna hate us! Oh no! What are they gonna think of us?" I think maybe the other perspective needs to be at least considered. Maybe they're gonna think we are serious. Maybe they're gonna think we mean it this time. Maybe they're gonna think we're not gonna kowtow to them. Maybe the people who ordered this are pretty smart. Maybe the people who executed this pulled off a brilliant maneuver. Nobody got hurt. Nobody got physically injured. But boy there was a lot of humiliation of people who are trying to kill us -- in ways they hold dear. Sounds pretty effective to me if you look at us in the right context.

Yes indeed.

Literally.

Body network gains speed

The human body is capable of many things, including acting as an information conduit -- quite literally.

Researchers from NTT Docomo Multimedia Labs and NTT Microsystem Integration Labs in Japan have demonstrated a 10-megabits-per-second indoor network that uses human bodies as portable ethernet cables.

The network, dubbed ElectAura-Net, is wireless, but instead of using radio waves, infrared light, or microwaves to transmit information it uses a combination of the electric field that emanates from humans and a similar field emanating from special floor tiles.

The network is faster than commercially available personal area networks like the 1-megabit-per-second Bluetooth radio wave system, and tops the 4-megabits-per-second infrared standard set by the Infrared Data Association (IrDA).

The system could eventually provide high-speed wireless communications among portable electronic devices whose positions constantly change. "The main aim of the system is to provide [a] new indoor communication infrastructure for [the] coming wearable and ubiquitous [computing] era," said Masaaki Fukumoto, a researcher at NTT Docomo Multimedia Labs.

Yep, just keeps getting better and better.

Rueful Rumsfeld: `Cruel' truth hurts: Rape and murder feared in Iraq abuse

The Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal took an explosive turn yesterday with the revelation that photos and graphic videotapes not yet made public show abuses more horrific than those already seen.

Signaling the worst revelations are yet to come, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the additional photos show ``acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman.''

``There are a lot more photographs and videos that exist,'' Rumsfeld testified before Congress.

``If these are released to the public, obviously it's going to make matters worse. That's just a fact.''

The unreleased images show American soldiers beating one prisoner almost to death, apparently raping a female prisoner, acting inappropriately with a dead body, and taping Iraqi guards raping young boys, according to NBC News.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said the scandal is ``going to get worse'' and warned that the most ``disturbing'' revelations haven't yet been made public.

``The American public needs to understand, we're talking about rape and murder here,'' he said. ``We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience; we're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges.''

Update 2: I must say that I'm baffled by the fact that all this evidence exists. I mean, these people are really, really stupid. Even if you're not morally outraged by all this crap, you simply have to marvel at the incompetence of the entire affair - from the actual acts (torture is a well known idiocy as far as information gathering practices are concerned) to the handling of the investigation to the handling of this by the Administration to the unbelievable contortions some of my fellow citizens are going to excuse the whole sordid, tortured affair.

Me, I'm still completely outraged at just the thought that my fellow citizens did this crap (not to mention the chain of command). But hey, the sheer incompetence of every aspect of this whole Iraq affair - from beginning to end - has been stunning. Every time we peel back the onion layer it just keeps getting more and more surreal.

Again, my only explanation for all of this is Alien Colonization. Wouldn't you have to be really skilled to screw things up this badly?

Sorry, but it was echoing in my mind all day while reading the various justifications of torture and indignations regarding responsibility n' such around the web today.

Via Shriekback

In a jungle of the senses
Tinkerbell and Jack the ripper
Love has no meaning, not where they come from
But we know pleasure is not that simple
Very little fruit is forbidden
Sometimes we wobble, sometimes we're strong
But you know evil is an exact science
Being carefully correctly wrong

Chorus
Priests and cannibals, prehistoric animals
Everybody happy as the dead come home
Big Black Nemesis, parthenogenesis
No one move a muscle as the dead come home

We feel like Greeks, we feel like Romans
Centaurs and monkeys just cluster round us
We drink elixirs that we refine
from the juices of the dying
We are no monsters, we're moral people
and yet we have the strength to do this
This is the splendor of our achievement
Call in the air strike with a poison kiss

Chorus
Priests and cannibals, prehistoric animals
Everybody happy as the dead come home
Big black nemesis, parthenogenesis
No-one move a muscle as the dead come home

How bad it gets, you can't imagine
the burning wax, the breath of reptiles
god is not mocked, he knows our business
Karma could take us at any moment
Cover him up.....I think we're finished
You know it's never been so exotic
but I don't know, my dreams are vicious
We could still end up with the great big fishes

Chorus
Priests and cannibals, prehistoric animals
Everybody happy as the dead come home
Big black nemesis, parthenogenesis
No-one move a muscle as the dead come home.

That was the subject of an email that was sent to me a couple of days ago. Leaving aside the 70% of my email which consists of offers to enlarge my penis, I still get a lot of weird email. Some of it hateful, a lot of it bizarre. But this was interesting.

Some time ago, one of your associates called our anonymous TIPS hotline to warn us of your subversive and un-American thoughts, speech or activities.

Since then we have been monitoring you. We are not pleased with your progress since first being reported. Ignorance is no excuse when it comes to national security. There is no appeal: our decisions are final and secret.

Recently your associate called us for a second time to report your behavior has only gotten worse. Several of our other methods of monitoring you also indicate this is true.

This warning letter is to inform you that at our law enforcement order, we have a three strikes - you're incarcerated policy. You now have two strikes. If you do not obey and conform immediately we will have to take corrective action by incarcerating you in our re-education work camp. Mend your ways or expect a knock on the door at night and a long visit with us.

The Stanford Prison Experiment

Welcome to the Stanford Prison Experiment web site, which features an extensive slide show and information about this classic psychology experiment. What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph? These are some of the questions we posed in this dramatic simulation of prison life conducted in the summer of 1971 at Stanford University.

How we went about testing these questions and what we found may astound you. Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress. Please join me on a slide tour of describing this experiment and uncovering what it tells us about the nature of Human Nature.

End of Stimulus Cycle

What we are seeing now is not a rebound by historical standards. Producing 300,000 jobs in a month is dwarfed by rebounds past - which had smaller economies. Instead, what we are seeing now is the first crisis point of the recovery - where demand has increased so quickly that commodity inflation threatens to reawaken. The search begins for the "soft landing" of the expansion - to tighten enough to head off commodity inflation, without choking the expansion. The commodity inflation that was seen in 1993 and 1994 was successfully headed off, and this resulted in an economy which slowed in 1996, but then began growing again, because it had not been choked off completely.

The "soft landing" has been three times - in the Kennedy-Johnson expansion, the Reagan expansion and the Clinton expansion. The failures to find a soft landing - under Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Carter - are all instructive, a recession results. The successes however are equally instructive. What follows is "the boom" - a period of above trendline growth which leads to the next recession when the Fed must act to restrain both commodity inflation and asset inflation.

The proof that we are in this "search for the soft landing" phase is not good news for households batted by 3 years of dismal earnings growth, dismal wage growth, dismal job market and falling - in real terms - stock values. It means that there is, in all likelihood, only 6 months of strong growth left in this phase of the expansion, followed by a slowing down, and a flat period by mid-2005 as the effects of austerity - higher interest rates and reduced government spending - take their toll to reign in inflation. Hence Greenspan's warnings and the break out of the real price of oil from its long trading range.

Well, the RWAP is now showing their true face.

Good Ol' Wince chimes in favor of Mrs. Kim "I'm a real man because I don't eat quiche" DuToit's assertion that GW should just adjourn the Congress and get rid of these pests once and for all.

These dopes are ignorant twits with guns. CEO worshiping corporatist.
Morons. Demagogues. Complete Dangerous idiots.

The future is now.

Researchers close in on atomic storage target

A group of physics researchers have created a device that's able to store one bit of data in one atom, according to published data from a member of the research team.

Franz Himpsel and a team from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have used a scanning tunneling microscope traveling over a silicon surface, the tip of which can detect the presence of a single silicon atom that can be used to represent binary zero or binary one.

At this stage, the data silicon atom must be separated from its neighbors by placing it in a five-by-four cell of atoms, and therefore requires 20 atoms in all to securely store one bit, according to data published on the university's Web site.

This translates into a storage density of 250T bits per square inch, which is 2,500 times denser than the 100G bits per square inch that can be stored on the most advanced conventional hard disk drives, Himpsel said.

The atomic memory on silicon device has been tested for reliability and speed. Reading data can be achieved at a reasonable rate, although slower than in hard disk drives, but writing data at the maximum data density is currently too slow to be practical, according to Himpsel.

*

Via The Talking Heads

You'll be, hmm-hmm-hmm-hmm, magnet for money
You'll be, mm-mm-mm-mm, magnet for love
You'll feel, hmm, light in your body
Now I'm gonna say, gonna say these words:

Rompiendo la monotonia del tiempo
Rompiendo la monotonia del tiempo

It might hmm-mmm-mm-mm...It might rain money
It might hm-hi-hi-hi...It might rain fire
Now I'm gonna call,
Gonna call on Legba.
Get yourself a sign
Get your love and desire.

Rompiendo la monotonia del tiempo
Rompiendo la monotonia del tiempou
Papa Legba,
Come and open the gate.
Papa Legba,
To the city of camps.
Now, we're your children
Come and ride your horse
In the night
In the night
Come and ride your horse

There is a queen
Of six sevens and nines
Dust in your garden
Poison in your mind
There is a king
That will steal your soul
Din't let him catch you,
Don't let him get control.

Rompiendo la monotonia del tiempo
Rompiendo la monotonia del tiempo

Papa Legba,
Come and open the gate
Papa Legba,
To the city of camps
Now, we're your children
Come and ride your horse

In the night
In the night, come and ride your horse
In the night
In the night, come and ride your horse
In the night
In the night, come and ride your horse

Earlier all the media was reporting that Bush said "I'm sorry" for all the torture n' stuff going on under his watch. I listened to the actual sound bite on the way home from work. What he actually said was that he was "sorry for the abuse of the Iraqi prisoners". So I was quite shocked (shocked, I say) to see that the story line has now morphed into "Bush Apologizes for Iraq Abuse; Backs Rumsfeld".

Anyone above the age of 2 should understand that saying "I'm sorry" isn't the same thing as an apology. When I was a bad little boy, I was very sorry that I had been caught. It took quite a bit of my mother's will to get an apology from me. It's just the way humans are.

So while I'm very sure that Bush is sorry for the abuse of the Iraqi prisoners, he really hasn't apologized. Now it's one thing if you think he has nothing to apologize for. Arguments about a few bad apples and maybe the psycho-sexual Tiffin fantasies of Rush Limbaugh. But if Bush believes such tripe then he simply cannot apologize for the Iraqi prisoner abuse - by definition. You're sorry that it happened, but you bear no responsibility for it - the "bad apples" are the one's that are responsible.

Maybe it's too fine of a point for a lot of the right wing to understand. Myself, it seems like a pretty darn broad line - not a fine point of distinction. In any event, it seems pretty darn clear to me that people who won't apologize and accept responsibility for 9/11 are certainly not going to apologize and accept responsibility for all the torture n' such done in the name of fighting the "war" on terror.

I would point out that this attitude is precisely the reason why all this stuff keeps happening, but other fingers - better than mine - have already been pointing at that moon.

I think Digby has nailed it.

Voyeur Nation

Bush and his band of faux moralists were in part chosen by the Republican establishment precisely because of their reputations for sexual rectitude. They knew they could get away with almost anything as long as they didn't expose themselves to accusations of sex -- of any kind. (The closest they came to slipping was Bush's Top Gun flight of fancy, but that faded soon enough.) The press and the public are attuned to the tiniest hint of sexual impropriety, both loving it and pretending to be shocked by it, and the GOP knows this because they virtually created the environment of sexual hypocricy our culture slavishly embraces.

The pictures at Abu Ghraib have brought sex back into the White House and they don't have a good way of dealing with it. Look at Rush --- he totally misread the party line (but he knows his public...) The politicians are soiled by their association with this violent kinkiness, but their followers, like Americans everywhere, are drawn to those images like moths to the flame. They can't escape it and they can't change the subject. No matter how pious and faithful, Bush is tainted. It's his war. It's his sex scandal. It's Clinton rules.

I don't pretend to know how this will play out long term. But, sex has been introduced into the equation now and that changes everything. The scandal receptors are turned on and the American people will start to watch. As with most sexually hypocritical cultures, voyeurism is one of America's biggest thrills. If news of further sexual humiliation and worse is confirmed about other prisons and prison camps around the world, the country will be watching with bated breath.

Restoring Our Honor

Surely the bar is now set so low that even this administration can successfully clear it.

A Steven Den Beste bitch slapping is one of my favorite things to watch. Especially when it's done with such ruthless grace and obvious pleasure.

Bats aren't bugs

I guess what I’m really saying is it’s about time that whole ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ meme - which was funny for about three days - gets laid totally and finally and utterly to rest. It doesn’t need, at this late stage in its career, to morph into a giant sequel to the Phenomenology of Spirit. It doesn’t need to be an a priori philosophy of anti-Europe grousing that pretends its motto is ‘I dunno, let’s look and see.’

If John Kerry loses a single red-blooded, empirical American vote on the grounds that he fraternizes with p-idealizing surrender hive-minds - I swear somebody is going to deserve a kick in the noumenon.

This is a most excellent entry I found via monitoring the Furl global feed.

This is taken from the book "Straight and crooked thinking" by Robert H. Thouless. I just snagged the last used copy off of Amazon, so you'll have to go a spelunking. . . Still, follow the link, as it's quite good.

Thirty-eight dishonest tricks which are commonly used in argument, with the methods of overcoming them

In most textbooks of logic there is to be found a list of "fallacies", classified in accordance with the logical principles they violate. Such collections are interesting and important, and it is to be hoped that any readers who wish to go more deeply into the principles of logical thought will turn to these works. The present list is, however, something quite different. Its aim is practical and not theoretical. It is intended to be a list which can be conveniently used for detecting dishonest modes of thought which we sAzaell actually meet in arguments and speeches. Sometimes more than one of the tricks mentioned would be classified by the logician under one heading, some he would omit altogether, while others that he would put in are not to be found here. Practical convenience and practical importance are the criteria I have used in this list. If we have a plague of flies in the house we buy fly-papers and not a treatise on the zoological classification of Musca domestica. This implies no sort of disrespect for zoologists; or for the value of their work as a first step in the effective control of flies. The present book bears to the treatises of logicians the relationship of fly-paper to zoological classifications. Other books have been concerned with the appraisal of the whole of an argumentative passage without such analysis into sound and unsound parts as I have attempted. Undoubtedly it is also important to be able to say of an argued case whether it has or has not been established by the arguments brought forward. Mere detection of crooked elements in the argument is not sufficient to settle this question since a good argumentative case may be disfigured by crooked arguments. The study of crooked thinking is, however, an essential preliminary to this problem of judging the soundness of an argued case. It is only when we have cleared away the emotional thinking, the selected instances, the inappropriate analogies, etc, that we can see clearly the underlying case and make a sound judgement as to whether it is right or wrong.

A great post by the Evangelical Outpost.

Fratboy Ethics: The Link Between Hazing and Abu Ghraib Prison

For the past several days I’ve been returning to the photos of Abu Ghraib prison in an attempt to make sense of what I was seeing. There was something peculiar, almost familiar, about the pictures. The way the soldiers were smiling and posing gave me an odd sense of déjà vu. I had the eerie impression that I had seen similar photos before.

And then I realized -- I had. While it had been long ago, over ten years, I recognized that these were photos of a hazing incident.

Hazing has a deep-rooted association with college fraternities, athletics, and the military. When most people think of hazing they tend to imagine silly, “Animal House”-style pranks played on fraternity pledges. They’ve probably heard horror stories of hazing that went to far but assume that it’s generally nothing more than a harmless form of peer bonding. The truth, however, is far more insidious.

It’s no coincidence that these “rites of passage” tend to occur in settings involving socially immature young males. The adolescent and post-adolescent periods are a time when young males tend to be both highly insecure and fiercely competitive. Regardless of the justifications that are often claimed, the true value of hazing lies in the way it allows a person to assume a position of dominance and power over another human being. By humiliating others, a person gains an illusory sense of worth and importance.

As a young Marine in the late-‘80s, I both witnessed and experienced these activities firsthand. After boot camp I was assigned to a training command in Memphis where I would spend six months learning to become an avionics technician. Because the base was heavily populated with low ranking military students, an odd dynamic developed where we would constantly attempt to establish our place in the pecking order. Seniority amongst peers was often broken down into a matter of months, weeks, or even days. Though two Marines might both be Privates the one who had graduated boot camp first was allowed to assume a leadership role.

This fragmented hierarchy was of little use almost everywhere except the barracks. The barracks allowed us to be separated from those with genuine seniority and rank and provided us a space to turn on each other. Seniority was the dividing line that separated those who were doing and those who were receiving the hazing. While most of it was relatively mild (i.e., being held upside down with one’s head in a (freshly cleaned) toilet), some of it spilled over into more pernicious physical and mental abuse. Freshly promoted PFC’s, for example, would be forced to run the “gauntlet” where they would receive a punch in each arm on the location where there new stripes would be sewn on. Many young Marines were left with serious bruising after receiving 20-30 blows from their peers.

Upon entering the fleet, however, I discovered that my experiences were tame compared to the hazing that occurred in some units. The stories that circulated made the abuses in Iraq seem mild by comparison. Injuries were common occurrences and often cAzaelked up to “recreational activity.”

Yep, the fat could still be pulled from the fire.

Why Bush (and Everyone Else) Needs Kerry To Win

There's one obvious and desperately-needed first step: elect Kerry. The US and the "international community" need a convenient scapegoat for the mess in Iraq, and need a narrative that justifies a massive, long-term UN or NATO military presence in that country. We aren't going to solve problems like Fallujah nor dissuade those, like Moktada al-Sadr, with ambitions for rejectionist leadership without a huge, internationally-sanctioned military presence to stabilize Iraq. We also aren't going to get other countries to devote large portions of their military to this problem: in all likelihood such a stabilization force would have to include more US soldiers than are currently deployed in Iraq, not fewer. Clearly there's a tension here. It's tough to imagine Congress or the American public accepting an enormous long-term US military presence without clear US command and control over American troops. And it's also tough to figure out how to sell what amounts to an expansion of the current US-run occupation to Security Council countries that opposed the war in the first place. The solution is a scapegoat: The problem is that the natural (and well-deserved) candidate for scapegoathood is also currently the President of the United States. So there's no clear policy tool that the Executive Branch can use to put in place the optimal strategy.

Why do I see such beauty in blaming a single person for all our troubles? Because it's a simple story which will actually make a lot of things suddently seem possible. Once the troublemaker has been removed from the picture, we can all convince ourselves that we're in an entirely new situation. The Gordian Knot will be cut once the Iraq situation can be presented at the UN and in other multilateral forums as Bush's mistake instead of America's. I am quite certain that the election of a non-Bush president will be received around the world as evidence that Americans aren't such terrible people after all, and will open up a thousand possibilities for restructuring international relations. This kind of political narrative has worked again and again in the past: think of the reception afforded to President Fox of Mexico once he broke the PRI's hold on that country's politics, or the worldwide embrace of President Clinton during the 1990s.

Can you believe this? It's like we're living in a low budget, made for TV, Sci Fi film.

E-Vote Problems Overwhelm Feds

As alarm mounts over the integrity of the ATM-like voting machines 50 million Americans will use in the November election, a new federal agency has begun scrutinizing how to safeguard electronic polling from fraud, hackers and faulty software.

But the tiny U.S. Election Assistance Commission says it is so woefully underfunded that it can't be expected to forestall widespread voting-machine problems, which would cast doubt on the election's integrity.

The commission -- which on Wednesday conducts the first federal hearing on the security and reliability of electronic voting -- laments its predicament in a new report.

"We've found some deeply troubling concerns, and the country wants to know the solution," said DeForest B. Soaries Jr., a Republican and former New Jersey secretary of state named by President Bush in December to lead the agency.

The Washington, D.C., hearing will focus on the security risks of touch-screen machines, which computer scientists say cannot be trusted because they do not produce paper records, making proper recounts impossible. Despite reassurances from the machines' makers, at least 20 states are considering legislation to require a paper trail.

After hearing from academics, elections officials and voting-equipment company executives, the Soaries commission will issue recommendations -- for example, that poll workers should keep a stack of paper ballots handy in case machines fail to start. Machines in more than Azaelf the precincts in California's San Diego County malfunctioned during the March 2 presidential primary, and a lack of paper ballots may have disenfranchised hundreds of voters.

Created nearly a year after a congressional deadline, the Soaries-led agency took over the Federal Elections Commission's job of setting standards for ensuring the voting process is sound.

But the EAC lacks the authority to enforce any such standards, and the agency's first annual report, released Friday, is apt to disappoint anyone who had high expectations.

Created under the 2002 Help America Vote Act that began funneling $3.9 billion to states to upgrade voting systems after Florida's hanging-chad debacle, the agency's two Republican and two Democratic commissioners weren't appointed until December. Their first public meeting was in March. A bare-bones website only went live on Friday.

With only $1.2 million of its $10 million budget appropriated, the commission has so far been able to hire seven full-time staffers, borrowing some part-timers from other federal agencies.

The lack of funding has forced the EAC to abandon or delay much of its intended mission. For example, it won't be able to develop a national system for testing voting machines, according to the report.

Objectivism On Campus

Despite Ayn Rand's popularity among young people, her ideas are often rejected or ignored at high schools and universities. Campus Objectivist Clubs are one way for students to bring these ideas to their schools. Join our student database to find out about Objectivist activities at your school or in your area, and to be kept informed about news and events of interest to students of Objectivism.

Iron Blog.

Again, I am completely baffled by anyone who thinks that people who have done everything wrong up until this point stand a snowball's chance in hell of doing anything right.

As Zinni said, staying the course doesn't mean following this pack of Jackals over the Niagara Falls. . .

Make sure you read the whole article.

Mutiny is the only way out of Iraq's inferno

The UN betrayed Iraq by becoming the political arm of US occupation. Now it must redeem itself.

Can we please stop calling it a quagmire? The United States isn't mired in a bog in Iraq, or a marsh; it is free-falling off a cliff. The only question now is: who will follow the Bush clan off this precipice, and who will refuse to jump?

More and more are, thankfully, choosing the second option. The last month of US aggression in Iraq has inspired what can only be described as a mutiny: waves of soldiers, workers and politicians under the command of the US occupation authority suddenly refusing to follow orders and abandoning their posts. First Spain announced that it would withdraw its troops, then Honduras, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Kazakhstan. South Korean and Bulgarian troops were pulled back to their bases, while New Zealand is withdrawing its engineers. El Salvador, Norway, the Netherlands and Thailand will likely be next.

And then there's the US-controlled Iraqi army. Since the latest wave of fighting, its soldiers have been donating their weapons to resistance fighters in the south and refusing to fight in Falluja. By late April, Major General Martin Dempsey, commander of the 1st Armoured Division, was reporting that "about 40% walked off the job because of intimidation. And about 10% actually worked against us".

And it's not just Iraq's soldiers who have been deserting the occupation. Four ministers of the Iraqi governing council have resigned in protest; and Azaelf the Iraqis with jobs in the secured "green zone" - as translators, drivers, cleaners - are not showing up for work. Minor mutinous signs are emerging even within the ranks of the US military: privates Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey have applied for refugee status in Canada as conscientious objectors, and Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia is facing court martial after he refused to return to Iraq on the grounds that he no longer knew what the war was about.

Rebelling against the US authority in Iraq is not treachery, nor is it giving "false comfort to terrorists", as George Bush recently cautioned Spain's new prime minister. It is an entirely rational and principled response to policies that have put everyone living and working under US command in grave and unacceptable danger. This view is shared by the 52 former British diplomats who, in their letter to Tony Blair, stated that although they endorsed his attempts to influence US policy on the Middle East, "there is no case for supporting policies which are doomed to failure".

Right wingers take note. The "Isolated Incident" line is now officially dead.

General Suggests Abuses at Iraq Jail Were Encouraged

The Army Reserve general whose military police officers were photographed as they mistreated Iraqi prisoners said Saturday that she had been "sickened" by the pictures and had known nothing about the sexual humiliation and other abuse until weeks later.

But the officer, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski of the 800th Military Police Brigade, said the special high-security cellblock at the Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad, where the abuses took place had been under the tight control of a separate group of military intelligence officers who had so far avoided any public blame. [ed: probably the same Intelligence agencies who are monitoring blogs?]

In her first public comments about the brutality — which drew wide attention and condemnation after photographs documenting it were broadcast Wednesday night by CBS News — General Karpinski said that while the reservists involved were "bad people" and deserved punishment, she suspected they were acting with the encouragement, if not at the direction, of military intelligence units that ran the special cellblock used for interrogation.

Speaking in a telephone interview from her home in South Carolina, the general said military commanders in Iraq were trying to shift the blame exclusively to her and the reservists.

"We're disposable," she said of the military's attitude toward reservists. "Why would they want the active-duty people to take the blame? They want to put this on the M.P.'s and hope that this thing goes away. Well, it's not going to go away."

She said the special cellblock, known as 1A, was one of about two dozen in the large prison and was essentially off limits to soldiers who were not part of the interrogations.

She said repeatedly in the interview that she was not defending the actions of the reservists who took part in the brutality, who were part of her command. She said that when she was first presented with the photographs of the abuse in January, they "sickened me."

"I put my head down because I really thought I was going to throw up," she said. "It was awful. My immediate reaction was: These are bad people, because their faces revealed how much pleasure they felt at this."

But she said the context of the brutality had been lost, including the fact that the military police officers involved represented only a small fraction of the nearly 3,400 reservists who reported to her from 16 different prisons and similar locations around Iraq.

She said she was also alarmed that little attention has been paid to the military unit that controlled Cellblock 1A, where her soldiers guarded the Iraqi detainees between interrogations.

She said that the floor space of the two-story cellblock was only about 40 feet by 20 feet, and that military intelligence officers were in and out of the cellblock "24 hours a day."

"They were in there at 2 in the morning, they were at 4 in the afternoon," said General Karpinski, who arrived in Iraq last June and who was the only woman to hold a command in the war zone. "This was no 9-to-5 job."

Ara is right. This is pretty cool: NewsMap. NewsMap monitors the Google News site and bases the area a headline is displayed with by the relative number of stories that Google has aggregated for the issue. Quick visual way to see what the internet is screaming about.

Clicking on the world map, I see:

Israel Minister Urges Likud 'Yes' for Gaza Pullout

Saudi Attack Kills 2 Americans, 5 Others

A Roll Call That Spoke for Itself, Without Added Justification

Jackson plea: Innocent of new charges

This is the country's future. It's ugly and painful for everyone, but I'd rather be a Democrat than a Republican in either faction. Going back to what I wrote in my earlier post on Kerry's predicament if he wins, I think he has no choice but to try to split the Republican party in the same way. If I were Kerry, I would devote every breakfast, lunch and dinner to meeting with every Republican who's willing to break bread with him, from the true moderates like Lincoln Chafee and Olympia Snowe through the old-timers like John Warner and Pete Domenici and the mavericks McCain and Hagel, and asking every one of them, "We don't have to agree, but are we here to govern this country, or wage ideological warfare?" And slowly, as they all understand the long-term fiscal crisis and the consequences of the Bush mania, just enough of them will decide they're here to govern and begin to work with Kerry. The solutions won't be to everyone's liking. They won't float Max Sawicky's or Jamie Galbraith's boat. It will feel a lot more like the first Bush Administration, with endless, unsatisfying budget summits at Andrews Air Force base. But they just might ward off disaster and make it possible to do something more constructive with government in the future.