Go forth and blog no more

No, I'm not dead yet. I've been getting ready for a month-long trip to Australia and New Zealand. Needless to say, blogging will continue to be light until I return in January (not that I seem to have a huge cadre of regular readers clamoring for material, but I thought I'd post this just in case anyone was wondering what has become of me).

So I wish a happy, prosperous, and peaceful new year to all. See you in '04.

Where are the Republicans when you need them?

An editorial in the Sacramento Bee (a great paper, by the way) points out that the Republican party has abrogated its traditional position of fiscal conservatism. The Democrats are the tax-and-spend party, and now the Republicans are the borrow-and-spend party.

"On the evidence of the expensive energy and Medicare prescription drug bills that Republicans have written and are poised, with President Bush's enthusiastic support, to push through Congress, the Republican Party has gone through the political equivalent of a sex change operation. Donning the garb of the Democrats they once berated, Republicans have become the party of spend now, pay someday."

Faith in science

I've been having a very interesting email exchange with a self-professed Christian about various theological and philosophical issues, so when my wife discovered an odd message on our answering machine yesterday I briefly entertained the possibility that this was a Sign from God. The message was garbled and barely understandable, but still unmistakably my voice. Trick is, I was absolutely 100% sure that I hadn't left any messages on the machine.

What is interesting is that even before I figured out what had happened I was very confident that I would figure it out despite the fact that I was seeing with my own eyes (or at least hearing with my own ears) a situation that on its face had no logical explanation. I have faith in science. I believe in science even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

The difference between my faith and religious faith, I think, is that my faith in science is only temporary. Sooner or later a logical explanation has to present itself. If I am ever faced with a situation that stubbornly resists all attempts at a logical or scientific explanation then I might discard my faith in science. But so far nothing has even come close, not even my own voice on an answering machine with no memory of my having put it there.

The crucial clues to figure out the puzzle turned out to be these:

1. Not only was the message garbled, but it was also very long, about ten minutes, most of which was just silence.

2. My wife noted that she hadn't heard the phone ring, and indeed, she thought the ringer was broken. It wasn't.

3. The answering machine is mounted on the wall above a small counter in the kitchen where we keep our cat's food dish.

(Getting good, isn't it?)

4. The answering machine keeps a time stamp, and the message was recorded at about the time I left for work.

So what happened was that our cat somehow managed to push the "memo record" button on the machine and record me saying goodbye to my wife as I left for work that day. It took about half an hour to figure this out. It was an interesting half hour.

What's wrong with this war?

One of the things that supporters of the war in Iraq don't seem to realize is that what wrong with war and what's wrong with this war are not the same thing. Because they don't realize this they often make the mistake of assuming that people who oppose this war oppose all war. They then proceed to knock down this straw man by arguing that not fighting a war can result in more suffering than fighting one, often pointing to World War II to bolster their case.

That this is a mistake is easily seen by observing that support for the war in Afghanistan was vastly greater than support for the war in Iraq, so there must be significant numbers of people out there who supported the Afghan war but do not support the Iraq war. I am one such person. I am not so much against war as I am against this war. There are times when it is necessary to go to war. World War II after the German invasion of Poland was one of those times. Afghanistan was not so clear-cut, but I still came down on the side of invading at the time, though I am not in retrospect certain that my position was driven by principle so much as emotion and expediency. I can remember bursting into a spontaneous cheer when George Bush on the evening of September 11, 2001 said, "We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them." I remember being very worried about Afghanistan spinning out of control, and being very impressed when it didn't. If we hadn't gotten distracted in Iraq I might be a George Bush supporter today. But we did, so I'm not.

When it comes to Iraq it's just clear as day that we didn't have any business being there this time. Yes, Saddam was a bad man (probably still is). Yes, that is a significant understatement. No, that does not make it right for us to start a war to get rid of him. If it did, why is there no talk of invading North Korea to depose Kim Jong Il? It can't be because Kim isn't a bad man; we know he is. He's killed more of his own people than Saddam ever did. He is much closer to having nuclear weapons than Saddam ever was. He is much closer to having the means of delivering those weapons to our territory than Saddam could ever hope to be. And he has made overt threats against us. Saddam never did. The idea that we invaded Iraq on principle is untenable in light of our spineless mamby-pambying on Pyongyang. Standing on principle only when it's convenient is not standing on principle, it's demagoguery.

We did not invade Iraq because it was the right thing to do, we invaded Iraq because we could. We invaded it not on principle but on expedience. And now we find what should come as no surprise to anyone, least of all George Bush whose own father prophesied it ten years before, that occupying Iraq isn't very expedient after all.

The Right, of course, is quick to raise the specter of Adolf Hitler. The problem is that they only have this specter to raise because Neville Chamberlain (and Stanley Baldwin before him) gave Hitler the opportunity to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that Chamberlain had been wrong. The difference between Iraq and Germany is not the difference between Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler, it's the difference between 1933 and 1939. Imagine what the world might be like if Stanley Baldwin had launched a successful pre-emptive invasion of Germany in 1933, before there were any death camps, before the ghettos, before the invasion of Poland, before the Anschluss. At best we would not remember Adolf Hitler today not as the very personification of evil, but rather as a democratically elected leader who was deposed by force. At worst we would remember Baldwin as the villain who started World War II for no good reason.

The reason we had moral authority in World War II was precisely because we waited until Hitler demonstrated himself to be an actual threat. That's the reason we had moral authority in the first Gulf War too. We ceded our moral authority the day George Bush the elder failed to support the popular uprising against Saddam that happened in the wake of that war and at his behest. Thousands of Iraqis rose up to fight for their freedom and were left dangling in breeze by an indifferent Bush administration.

Porphyrogenitus, whose blog entry I cited earlier, writes that we have a blood debt to the Iraqis. That is true. But we cannot pay it off by invading and occupying their country, and we certainly can't pay it off by exhibiting contempt for them in the process. If we're serious about paying off this debt, then getting on our hands and knees and begging them to forgive us for betraying them ten years ago would be a good start.

But of course, we won't do that. because this war isn't about principle, and never was.

And they know this how?

General John Abizaid says there are no more than 5,000 Iraqis fighting the U.S..

I wonder how he knows that in light of the fact that U.S. intelligence has a less than stellar track record when it comes to figuring out what's what in Iraq.

Or maybe he (or someone) just pulled a number out of a hat to help put a brave face on things?

Nah, they'd never do that.

Yeah, right.

Yasser Arafat has turned over a new leaf.

"Arafat Urges an End to Violence as He Swears In New Government"

And if you believe that I have a bridge to sell you.

Spawning a new cycle of violence

I don't like linking to the LA Times because they aren't permalinks, but this time the Times seems to have an exclusive.


U.S. Military Responding More Fiercely to Iraqi Guerrilla Strikes

By John Daniszewski and Patrick J. McDonnell, Times Staff Writers

MAMUDIYAH, Iraq — U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police arrived at the sprawling three-family farmhouse just after 4 p.m. with orders for the 15 or so people still living there: Grab what you can in the next 30 minutes, and then leave. Your house is about to be bombed.


And so begins another endless cycle of violence just like the one between Israel and Palestine. The locals begin to resent an occupation and fight back in the only way they can. The occupier responds with disproportionate force and without due process, thus breeding more hatred and resentment.

There was a time about 230 years ago when we Americans were on the other side of this equation. The perpetrators of the Boston Tea Party were, by the standards of their day, terrorists. How ironic that the occupier in that case was also named George, and how fortunate that he did not have B1's at his disposal.

Texas justice rides again

Robert Durst has been acquitted of murder despite the fact that he confessed. The crime and the trial occurred in Texas.

Can anyone really believe that Durst would have gotten off if he had been a poor black man instead of a rich white one?

It means "fuck you" in Arabic

This story appears on MSNBC, but I read it in Newsweek. Seems the local bombers in Iraq paint warnings on the roads that only the locals can read because they are in Arabic. But the Americans are learning the local customs:

"The Americans are leaning the universal language of insult. They catch on now when Iraqis in the seething Sunni Triangle flash them a backhanded V sign, which conveys roughly the same message as an extended middle finger back in the States. When Americans wish to demonstrate their contempt to the locals, they point to the soles of their feet, deeply offensive to Iraqis."

Whoa. Hold on there. Wind that back. "When Americans wish to demonstrate their conempt to the locals..."? Excuse me? In case you'd forgotten, we invaded them, not the other way around. And we wonder why the world hates us? The world hates us because we're a bunch of self-righteous assholes whose proudest achievement in mastering the local customs of a country that we have invaded is learning how to express our contempt for them! Unbelievable! I am at an utter loss to express how outraged I am. (I'm not sure what outrages me more, that this is happening, or that no one seems to be outraged about it.) I am ashamed to be an American today. On Veterans Day. I think I'm going to be sick.

The market knows...

... that the economic good news from the third quarter is probably bogus.

Republican hypocrisy

The main reason I loathe the Republicans so much is not because I don't believe in what they stand for. I do. If the Republicans actually followed their rhetoric I might be a Republican myself. But they don't.

The Republicans say they stand for fiscal conservatism, but every time there's a Republican in the White House the budget deficit goes up. Every time there's a Democrat in the White House the deficit goes down. It's really quite striking how good the correlation is. Take a look a the graph on this page. In 1980, Jimmy Carter lost the White House to Ronald Reagan. The budget deficit immedately shot up and remained high through the first Bush administration. Then in 1992 Bill Clinton took over and the deficit went down every single year for eight straight years. Then in 2000 Dubya took over and in three short years drove the budget back into deficit by amounts that dwarfed any of his predecessors. (Some say that Clinton's deficits went down because he had a Republican Congress and that Reagan's and Bush's went up because they had a Democratic Congress, but the last three years refutes that theory, to say nothing of the fact that deficits were going down during the first two years of the Clinton administration, when Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress.)

The Republicans say they stand for individual freedom and responsibility, but then they want to outlaw abortion and doctor assisted suicide (to say nothing of allowing the state to force-feed people in a persistent vegitative state against the wishes of their immedaite family). They say they stand for Democracy, but then they send John Ashcroft to Oregon to overturn a popular initiative permitting doctor assisted suicide that was passed not once but twice, and to California to overturn a popular initiative permitting the medical use of marijuana. The Republicans say they stand for Democracy, but in their actions they continually reveal their utter contempt for it.

The Republicans say they stand for small government, but then they pass the Patriot Act, and bring us closer to being a totalitarian state than at any time in our history.

The Republicans, at least as represented by their current leadership, are, in short, hypocrites, idealogical wolves in conservative sheep's clothing. This is not to say that the Democrats are saints; they aren't. I could probably write a good rant about them too, but they are not at the moment a clear and present danger to freedom and democracy. The Republicans are.

Fleeing a sinking ship redux

The Red Cross is pulling out of Baghdad.

Plus ca change...

What I found most striking about the image of George Bush signing the ban on late-term abortion is that there is not a single woman to be seen. (Not a single non-white person either.) The reason I find it striking is because the Bush administration generally sets new standards for weaseling (What? That "Mission Accomplished" banner was put up without your approval? You can't find the person who leaked the name of that CIA agent? Hmmm...) but here, in a rare moment of candor, however subtle, they show their true colors.

Make money fast!

Here's a new way to make a quarter of a million dollars.

1. Write a Windows virus and release it into the wild.

2. Plant the source code on someone else's machine. (If you're smart enough to write a successful virus you are surely smart enough to be able to do this.)

3. Call Microsoft

Another one bites the dust

Microsoft has set its sights on yet another company. Time to sell your Macromedia stock.

Another reason to vote Democratic

Democrats have better taste in software than Republicans.

Snookered!

Read between the lines of this story and see how the Turks have played the Bush administration like a cheap accordion.

It went like this:

1. Washington offered $8.5 billion worth of loans on "attractive terms" (those are scare-quotes, not real quotes) in exchange for Turkish "cooperation" in Iraq for one year.

2. The Turkish parliament voted to "offer" to send troops to Iraq.

3. Subsequent (and predictable) objections from the Iraqis and concommitant foot-dragging by the Turks has delayed the deployment of those troops almost certainly for the duration of the on-year "commitment".

Bottom line: the Turks got our money and we got nothing in return.

P.T. Barnum would be so proud.

A response to Chris Hall

Blogspeak, the service I use for my blog comments, seems to be down so I'll reply to this in a full-fledged post.

Chris Hall writes in a comment on my "Keep off the Grass" post:

If a suicide bomber, say, gets on an airplane,
slashes the stewardesses throats, kills the pilots and flies the plane into a
building (just hypothetical, mind you), well, he's dead. so, would you say
\"Hello! You can't hunt them down. They're already dead.\" ? Or would you
recognize that that fellow is part of an organization, and then go after the
organization.

Well, both actually. The point of that post was not so much that invading Iraq was wrong (I think it was, but that's another story) as that it was done ineptly and is now spinning very badly out of control, and that I find George Bush's attempts to rationalize the situation comical.

there is ironclad proof of Saddam/terrorist connections

Really? Where?

What do you suggest?

Vote for Howard Dean.

Seriously though, I believe that the only long-term solution to terrorism is to create a world where no one wants to be a terrorist because everyone thinks they have more to lose than to gain by becoming one. Force can help a little in the short term, but is ultimately doomed to fail. Because of that, force must be used with great discretion, much like antibiotics. If used indiscriminatly both lose their effectiveness and ultimately make the situation worse.

Another thing that I suggest is to keep things in perspective. The destruction of 9/11, horrific as it was, is still just a blip in the grand and glorious scheme of things. More people die in car crashes every month than were killed in the WTC attacks, but no one bats an eye. It's a price we're willing to pay for the freedom that comes with being able to drive. I didn't suffer any personal loss on 9/11 so it's not my place to speak for those who did, but I've said this before and I'll say it again: if, God forbid, I am ever the victim of a terrorist attack I hope no one will use that as an excuse to wage war or restrict civil liberties. I hope instead that they will honor my memory by saying that I paid the price of freedom. It is a price that I would gladly pay.

Fleeing a sinking ship

The rats are starting to bail.

The Problem with Abundance

Think you can never be too rich or too thin? Peter de Jager says think again (at least about the too-rich part).

Keep off the Grass

When I was but a wee lad I saw a politcal cartoon that I did not understand at the time, but it tickled my funny bone so much that I have never forgotten it. It was a picture of then-President Jimmy Carter furiously pounding a sign onto the White House lawn saying, "Keep off the grass". Behind the oblivious Carter the White House itself was quietly levitating into the air.

I think you could draw a similar cartoon about George Bush and the war on terrorism (or the war on drugs). Bush is all huff and bluster, putting up a sign on the White House gate saying, "Trespassers will be prosecuted" while behind him inside the white house two terrorists look at him and say, "I wonder what the sign says."

The fundamental problem with trying to fight a "war on terror" is that most of the time you can't tell who the enemy is until it's too late. Terrorists don't wear uniforms. They look just like everyone else. The entire historical development of "war" is predicated on the assumption that you can tell who it is you're suposed to be fighting. One of the reasons that Viet Nam went south (so to speak) is that it was the first "war" where this assumption didn't hold.

No one in the Bush White House recognizes this, and as a result they are running scared. I could hardly believe my ears when I listened to Bush in the wake of five coordinated terrorist bombings in Baghdad yesterday say with a straight face that this proves we're winning the war on terror because it shows that the "enemy" is getting increasingly "desperate". (I was reminded of the opening scene of Terry Gilliam's movie "Brazil" where the following exchange occurs between a reporter and the Deputy Minister of Information: Reporter: "The bombing campaign is now in its thirteenth year." Minister: "Beginner's luck.") Then there's this little gem: "Bush vowed to hunt down the "cold-blooded killers, terrorists" who are conducting the attacks." Hello! You can't hunt them down, Dubya, they're already dead. That's what "suicide bomber" means. And the image of a levitating White House returns to my mind's eye.

It would be funny if it weren't so tragic, because one of the inevitable consequences of insisting on fighting a war against an unseen enemy is that innocent people have their lives destroyed because if you're trying to fight a war and you can't find the enemy you are left with no alternative but to manufacture one.

Shooting the Messenger

And then there is the sad case of Nathaniel Heatwole, the student who snuck box cutters into a airplane to draw attention to ongoing problems in post-9/11 airport security.

The authorities, naturally, are going to lock him up instead of doing what they should do, which is to fire the head of the TSA, get down on their hands and knees, and beg Heatwole to take the job instead, because he obviously understands the problem much better than Admiral James Loy does.

Personally, the fact that there are holes in airport security doesn't bother me at all. In fact, I find it quite encouraging when taken in combination with the fact that there have been no terrorist incidents involving airplanes since 9/11 despite porous security. This means that the terrorists are not as numerous, well organized, motivated, and smart as they could be. This is ultimately our best, indeed our only real protection. The fact of the matter is that if someone wants to do some damage and is willing to die for it there is nothing you can do to stop them. The only protection against terrorism is to build a world where no one wants to be a terrorist. The events of the last two years show that at least in the United States we are not so far from that goal (notwithstanding the odd kook like John Allen Muhammad).

Talk To Me!

I met these two people on the streets of Manhattan last night. I'm in town for a conference, so I don't have much time to write about the experience (in fact, I'm sitting in a session trying to listen to a speaker posting this via a wireless network), but there are many articles about them on their web site. I have always found that New Yorkers (and Parisians for that matter), despite their reputations, are actually very friendly, and these two are extraordinarily so. My wife and I stood on the street and we just chatted with them for the better part of an hour. If you buy into the theory that wealth is measured by how many friends you have, Liz and Bill are the richest people I know.

The best novel no one has ever read

My pick: "The Anubis Gates" by Tim Powers. If like me you like plot-driven novels you will love it.

Don't they have anything better to do?

This just makes me want to puke. They're sending Tommy Chong (of Cheech and Chong fame) to prison for nine months for selling bongs over the Internet. Don't these people in the Justice Department have anything better to do?

It is not at all clear to me that the world would not be a better place if a few key people (John Ashcroft foremost among them) would get stoned now and again.

They came for the hackers...

There's an old fable that begins, "The came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak up." Nowadays they come not for the Jews but for the (alleged) drug dealers and terrorists and now, hackers.

(The "drug dealers" link above, by the way, is to a 60 Minutes story about an undercover narcotics agent named Tom Coleman who arrested 46 people -- all of them black -- on charges of dealing cocaine and got them sentenced to a combined total of 750 years in prison with no corroborating evidence whatsoever. Of course, anyone stupid enough to be black in Texas deserves whatever they get, right? This travesty is also described in more detail here.)

Telling it like it is (and paying the price)

Seven renouned and courageous computer scientists tell it like it is in a paper entitled Cyberinsecurity: The Cost of Monopoly. It's a bit technical, but well worth a read.

One of the authors, Daniel Geer, was fired for his association with this report.

What's wrong with this picture?

Today's Los Angeles Times sports the following headlines, one right after the other:

"Poverty Rate Increased in 2002"

"Economic Growth Picks Up Pace"

Oh, and then there's this:

"Recall Spending Tops $50 Million"

Some days I worry that American's will not come to their senses until the entire economy comes crashing down around them in a burning heap. Today is one of those days.

We're number one!

Los Angeles is back in the top spot as the nation's smoggiest city after being briefly overtaken by Houston a few years back.

I'm not surprised. You can cut the emissions of individual cars by 90%, but that only helps until you end up with ten times as many cars (which you inevitably will because for a while the cleaner air will make LA a more attractive place to live which will draw more people). No emission control measure (in fact, no environmental protection measure of any kind) can be anything but a temporary fix in the face of exponentially increasing populations.

Disgraceful indifference

The LA Times reports:

"A Louisiana man [named Calvin Willis] was released from the state penitentiary Friday after spending nearly half his life behind bars for a rape that DNA evidence now shows he did not commit."

It should come as no surprise that Willis is poor and black.

What is shocking is that Hugo Holland, chief of the sex crimes unit at the district attorney's office in Shreveport, refuses to admit that Willis is innocent, saying only that there is now enough "reasonable doubt" of Willis's guilt that the DA's office will not retry him. Holland's indifference to the fact (and it is a fact) that the real rapist is still out there offends human decency. (To say nothing of the fact -- and it is a fact -- that an innocent man was imprisoned for over twenty years.)

Hugo Holland, you digust me. You are a disgrace to the human race.

Getting in touch with reality

This is a promising sign. George Bush is beginning to get in touch with reality:

"President Bush said Wednesday that there was no proof tying Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11 attacks."

So are the American people.

We hold these truths...

The United States is holding 10,000 Iraqi prisoners.

Brigadier General Janis Karpinski is quoted as saying, "It's not that they don't have rights ... they have fewer rights than EPWs (enemy prisoners of war)."

Given that "enemy combatants" (not clear whether "enemy prisoners of war" means the same thing or not) have no right to council, no right of habeus corbus, no right of the presumption of innoncence, it is hard to imagine what sort of meaningful rights these prisoners might retain.

Once again the Bush administration demonstrates their contempt for the bedrock principle that our country was founded upon, that it is self-evident that all men, not just Americans, are created equal, and that they are endowed, not by the Constitution, but by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these rights are life and liberty.

The only truth that the Bush Administration considers to be self-evident is that there are terrorists everywhere, and that they must be eliminated by any means necessary. Go watch Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil (or read Orwell's 1984) to see the result of building a society on that premise.

The cost of civic duty

For the first time in my life (which is shocking considering how old I am) I had to report for jury duty today. The process is so apallingly inefficient that I was astonished despite the fact that I expected it to be apallingly inefficient.

I had to show up at the courthouse at 8 AM. We finally got through the preliminaries (sign in, watch the orientation videos, get the orientation pep talk from a judge) by 10 AM. I was among the first group of jurors called. 100 of us (about half the total pool) were sent down two floors, which took about half an hour because some of the elevators weren't working and there were no stairs. (The only stairs were emergency exit stairs, and once you're in the stairwell you can't get back into the building, presumably for security reasons.)

Finally, by 11:00 or so all 100 of us were inside the courtroom and learned why so many of us had been called down for this particular case: it was expected to last four weeks. For the third time that day the judge went down the list of jurors in order and asked each one if there was a reason why they couldn't serve on a trial that long. Most people, myself included, said that their employers wouldn't pay their salaries for that long a period of time, and were promptly sent back up to the jury room.

By the time I got back (after another long wait for the elevator) it was nearly lunch time, and because of the way the timing worked out, the normal 90 minute lunch break was extended to nearly two hours. Because I had so much time I was actually able to drive home for lunch!

I got back to the court house at about 1:30, found a quiet corner in the jury room and started reading. About twenty minutes later it was announced that we were no longer needed and we could all go home. Time was I would have had to go through this for ten days. As it stands, because I did not get empaneled on a jury my service is complete for a year.

Still, I and nearly two hundred other people more or less wasted an entire day. And this was a relatively small courthouse. I don't know if anyone has ever bothered to figure out what the overall cost to society is of having so many people twiddling their thumbs waiting for a judge or an elevator or whatever we were waiting for, but it must be a staggering sum.

There has to be a better way (notwithstanding that by comparison to the way things used to be this is a better way). And I'm afraid that if we don't find it our legal system will collapse under its own weight.

An honest man in Washington?

Reading the news from Washington sometimes makes me feel like Diogenes on his futile quest for an honest man in Athens. Luckily, I have found Dick Cheney, who has finally admitted:

"Yeah, I did misspeak," Cheney said. "I said repeatedly during the show, 'weapons capability.' We never had any evidence that [Hussein] had acquired a nuclear weapon."

"Misspeak" is, of course, Washington-speak for "lied."

Unfortunately, this is the only scrap of honesty in a maelstrom of frantic spinning:

"'That's physical evidence that we've got in hand today,' Cheney said. 'So to suggest that there is no evidence that [Hussein] had aspirations to acquire nuclear weapons, I don't think is valid.'"

No one ever doubted that Hussein had aspirations to acquire a nuclear weapon. But every two-bit thug in the world has aspirations to acquire a nuclear weapon. What matters is whether he had the means to acquire one quickly because that was (part of) the rationale that was given for invading Iraq now. And it is becoming quite apparent that he did not.

The bankruptcy of the pro-war position is made starkly evident in the discussion following this essay by Rand Simberg, the latest in a series of faux-news stories that cast the arguments of those opposed to the war in Iraq into the context of World War II. In the course of defending this untenable and offensive comparison Rand is forced to resort to theories like "Iraq and Saudi Arabia are allies," a claim so ridiculous as to hardly merit refuting.

What those on the right don't get is that we who oppose the war are not "appeasers". We share the goal of defeating terrorists. What we differ on is the means by which this is best accomplished. But when one has backed onesself into a rhetorical corner it is always easier to start spewing nonsense and attacking straw men than to admit that you were wrong, especially when you've been acting like an arrogant prick.

Good news

More signs that Microsoft's hegemony in the software market may be drawing to a close.

"FORD is joining the ranks of governments and local authorities across the world that have switched from Microsoft software to the free open-source alternative Linux. The car giant will run its sales operations, human resources, customer relations management and the rest of its infrastructure operations on the upstart technology."

A problem

Sacramento City Councilwoman Lauren Hammond had this to say about their local schools:

"The school district has done some wonderful things ... but (on state tests) half the students are still below the 50th percentile. That's a problem."

Indeed.

This is justice?

The LA Times reports that former Enron Treasurer Ben Glisan today was sentenced to five years in federal prison.

Five years is also the Federal mandatory minimum sentence for possession of five grams of crack (but not powder) cocaine..

Does posessing five grams of crack really do as much damage to society as stealing billions of dollars?

Hard choices

It's not hard to get what you want. The hard part is deciding what you want.

The death of democracy

The beginning of the end. You can watch it happen here.

Mixed feelings

A terrorist has been brought to justice.

"Nine years after he calmly shot and killed an abortion doctor and his volunteer escort outside a Pensacola clinic, Paul Jennings Hill died by lethal injection here today as his supporters declared him a martyr and warned that his actions might be replicated."

I can almost understand the twisted logic that leads someone to kill an abortion doctor and feel no remorse, but the magnitude of the denial needed to justify the killing of his bodyguard is beyond my comprehension.

No conflict of interest here

The Plain Dealer reports:

"The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is 'committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.' "

No conflict of interest here. No threat to democracy either. Nope. No sir.

Prepare to be assimilated

Microsoft, after years of honing the process to perfection, is about to squash one of the last remaining vestiges of competition in the software market.

The Revolution draws nigh

Marshall Brain has some interesting speculations about what will happen as robots start to replace people in the workforce. The ensuing discussion on Slashdot is also interesting. In a nutshell, the end of the Cold War was not the end of Communism, just the end of what Marx knew all along was just a false start. The real Worker's Revolution is still coming. You have been warned.

Prevention non-paradox

The LA Times says: "Paradoxically, it seems that the more we spend on cancer research, the more cancer we get."

Paradoxically? Hardly. It makes perfect sense, for two reasons: first, there is a negative incentive for cancer researchers to find ways to prevent cancer. If they were to ever succeed in preventing cancer their careers would all be over. Second, Americans love heros. The people who get the big accolades are not the ones who keep things running smoothly, but rather the ones who pull a situation back from the very brink of disaster. Curing cancer is much sexier than preventing it.

You can see this mentality at work in many aspects of American life. Take the space program. The most celebrated moment of NASA's history, its "finest hour", was not any of its many successes, but it closest brush with failure, Apollo 13. The most celebrated moment of the Iraq war was the rescue of Jessica Lynch. If Apollo 13 hadn't had an oxygen tank explode, or if Jessica Lynch's convoy hadn't taken a wrong turn, no one would remember them today.

So to me it's no surprise at all that cancer rates are going up, or that blackouts are happening, or that computer viruses are spreading, or that space shuttles are exploding. There's just no percentage in preventing these things from happening. Americans barely notice quiet competence, let alone reward it. It's too boring. Americans love heros, and they love drama. There's nothing heroic or dramatic about telling someone that they should stop smoking and excercise more.

And the beast rolls on

If you think Microsoft is playing fair since it lost the anti-trust lawsuit bright by the U.S. government, think again. Dirty dealing is alive and well in Redmond.

The First Amendment takes another hit

If you search Google for kazaa lite you may notice that the site "http://www.kazaa.com" is not in the results. If you scroll down to the bottom of the first page you will find the reason. The URL "http://www.kazaa.com" and 14 others are copyrighted under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), one of the many Orwellian laws that have been passed by Congress in recent years.

I wonder if I can copyright the phrase, "Congress is a bunch of big fat weenies."

It's hot out there

The death toll from France's recent heat wave has reached 11,435. Four times the number who died in the 9/11 attacks, and the vast majority of them preventable with nothing more than air conditioning and a bottle of water. Appalling.

A Dispassionate Look at The Passion

Larry Leupp writes some dispassionate notes on the controversy surrounding the new Mel Gibson movie, "The Passion." Worthwhile, if lengthy, reading.

I take issue with Leupp on only one minor detail:

"We know very little about this man, Yehoshua or Yeshua (Jesus). The Roman historian Tacitus (ca. 55-115) and the Roman-born Jewish historian Josephus Flavius (37-ca. 101), mention him, telling us little except that he was crucified by order of the Roman procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate."

It is pretty clear that at least some of Josephus's references to Jesus are forgeries. For example, take this passage:

"3. Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day."

The immediately following text is:

"4. About the same time also another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder..."

which seems exceedingly odd, implying as it does that Jesus was "a sad calamity". But it makes perfect sense when you look at the passage immedaitely preceding:

"2. But Pilate undertook to bring a current of water to Jerusalem, and did it with the sacred money, and derived the origin of the stream from the distance of two hundred furlongs. However, the Jews were not pleased with what had been done about this water; and many ten thousands of the people got together, and made a clamor against him, and insisted that he should leave off that design. Some of them also used reproaches, and abused the man, as crowds of such people usually do. So he habited a great number of his soldiers in their habit, who carried daggers under their garments, and sent them to a place where they might surround them. So he bid the Jews himself go away; but they boldly casting reproaches upon him, he gave the soldiers that signal which had been beforehand agreed on; who laid upon them much greater blows than Pilate had commanded them, and equally punished those that were tumultuous, and those that were not; nor did they spare them in the least: and since the people were unarmed, and were caught by men prepared for what they were about, there were a great number of them slain by this means, and others of them ran away wounded. And thus an end was put to this sedition."

So paragraph 3 was obviously inserted after paragraphs 2 and 4 were written, and it was done by someone who didn't have a very good copy editor.

Follow up

As a followup to my last post it should be noted that

"levels of gun violence in the U.S. have declined substantially over the past decade, while the level of civilian gun ownership has increased."

according to The Hill Times.

That's the good news. The bad news is:

"the U.S. gun homicide rate is [still] seven times higher than Canada's"

Could it be?

I finally saw Michael Moore's movie "Bowling for Columbine." Highly recommended, especially the DVD version which has lots of worthwile extra goodies. It is an amazing movie. It slaughters many sacred cows on both the left and the right with respect to gun violence.

There are three scenes that made a particular impact on me. The first was when he went door to door to see whether Canadians really don't lock their doors (they really don't). And despite the fact that they have more guns per capita than the United States their gun murder rate is two orders of magnitude lower. That ought to lay to rest once and for all the idea that gun control is the answer to gun violence in the U.S.

The second was a South Park cartoon "A Brief History of the United States" which puts forth the (plausible IMO) thesis that gun violence in the U.S. has its roots in slavery and segregation.

The third was the interview with Charlton Heston, which was amazing on so many levels, not least of which was the fact that Moore got an interview with Heston simply by walking up to his house and asking for one. But the most amazing (and painful) part of the movie was watching Heston, the president of the NRA (and probably showing the early symptoms of Alzheimer's) squiriming after he said that he thought that the root cause of gun violence in the United States was the "racial diversity" we have, which of course makes it look like code for: it's all the niggers' fault.

That is why I was surprised yesterday when I was watching a retrospective of the 1963 civil rights march on Washington and saw that Heston had been there supporting it.

Then in the middle of the night I suddenly made a connection. My parents are from Israel, and so I was raised with certain elements of Israeli culture (which is distinct from Jewish culture, by the way). One of the most striking differences between Israeli and American culture is that Israelis love to argue. It's a spectator sport, and a normal part of family life. Most Americans, on the other hand, seem to bend over backwards to avoid getting into arguments. Being confrontational is anathema to most Americans. An American family that argues too much is considered dysfunctional.

(There is one exception: there are polarizing issues, like abortion, where Americans love to argue, but they do it in a peculiar way: they frame the debate as two extremes, they choose sides, and then the sides shout at each other. The goal on both sides is not resolution but victory.)

So here's my theory: I think Americans are deathly afraid of resolution. The reason they are afraid of resolution is that to resolve something both parties must take the risk of having to admit that they were wrong about something, and the American psyche is unwilling to take that risk. And the reason for that is that Whites are paralyzed with fear that they might have to face up to the horrible reality of how blacks have been treated in this country. Our culture of violence, our 10,000-plus gun deaths a year, perhaps even the war on Iraq, is nothing more than a psychological defense mechanism writ large.

We like to think that the evil of slavery is a thing of the past, but the slaves weren't really freed in 1861, they were just sold into a more subtle form of slavery (sharecropping), where they remained for 100 years, when they were sold into an even more subtle form of slavery (being the stock villains on the evening news). At every stage there were (and are) both whites and blacks willing to stand up to defend the status quo. But I think that deep in her heart America knows that she has not truly repented for her racial sins, which continue to this day. I don't know this for sure, of course, but it could explain a lot.

What to do? I don't know, but here's a shot in the dark: I ask the blogosphere to hear my confession. I am a first-generation immigrant to the United States. Neither I nor any of my ancestors ever owned a slave. Nonetheless, I have benefited from having white skin at the expense of those who have black skin. I had no direct hand in creating the system that provided me with these benefits, but I accepted them without complaint, and that makes me culpable. I have looked at black men in the night and felt more fear than I would have if it had been a white man. I am ashamed of this. I am sorry. I ask for forgiveness -- and understanding. I, and I think many white people, do what we do out of ignorance and weakness and not out of malicious intent (though to be sure there are those who would oppress blacks - and Mexicans and Jews and gays and Muslims... - out of pure evil) and we haven't got a freakin' clue what to actually do to start making things right (though repealing the Draconian penalities for crack cocaine posession would probably be a good start).

I think it's important that we figure this out, that we start to seek resolution rather than victory, because if we don't I think there's a good chance our children are going to keep shooting each other. As I said, I don't have an answer, but the first necessary step towards recovery is simply to admit you have a problem.