How many?

Question: How many multinational corporations could engage in systematic and ongoing sexual abuse of children, cover up that abuse for decades, and remain in business once these practices were revealed?

Answer: At least one.

But is it murder?

The Telegraph reports that smoking 'kills up to 5,000 fetuses a year'.

I wonder when conservatives will start to push to make smoking while pregnant a crime. I'm not holding my breath.

So wrong

This is so wrong. The French national assembly has voted overwhelmingly to ban head scarves and skullcaps in public schools. The justification for this fascist law is that "the ban would help to keep classes from dividing up into 'militant religious communities.'"

This beggars the imagination. Do the French really think that everyone won't know who the Muslim and Jewish kids are even if they aren't wearing headscarves and skull caps?

And wouldn't banning Jews and Muslims from public school entirely would be even more effective? But, oh, you'll still have Jews and Muslims flaunting their religous regalia in other public areas. How long before France decides it needs a final solution to the Muslim and Jewish problem?

There is no difference between forcing a Muslim woman to not wear a headscarf and forcing a Jew to wear a yellow star. It's not about separation, it's about individual freedom. When the government gets into the business of deciding what people may and may not wear it takes its first steps towards fascism. When it makes those decisions based on items of clothing associated with religious and ethnic groups it takes its first step towards Nazism.

On a related note, immigration officials in Maine have begun raiding ethnic supermarkets looking for illegal aliens. Local officials have begun advising all non-citizens to carry their immigration documents at all times. No, I am not making this up. It is true. In the United States we now have people living in fear of government officials stopping them on the street and demanding to see their papers. Of course, citizens who have dark skins or accents should probably also carry their passports with them at all times to avoid being mistaken for an alien without documentation. How long before no one but whites will be able to walk American streets without fear of being hauled away? And how long after that before no one will be able to do so any more, and "the home of the free" will just be an abstract memory?

If this sounds alarmist you should go read some histories of Berlin in the early thirties.

Someone needs to get a life

I am shocked (but not at all surprised) that someone is suing Janet Jackson::


Knoxville native Terri Carlin filed a proposed class action lawsuit in a U.S. District Court on Wednesday, charging the accused with causing her and 'millions of others' to 'suffer outrage, anger, embarrassment and serious injury.' The suit reportedly seeks billions of dollars in compensatory and punitive damages.


There is staggering irony that this is happening at the same time that France is about to ban the wearing of head scarves in public schools. I am not that familiar with Islamic culture but I am given to understand that Muslim women cover their heads for exactly the same reason that women from Western cultures cover their breasts (except on the Cote D'azure). Demanding that a Muslim women go bare-headed is tantamount to demanding that a Western woman go bare-chested.

But, of course, no one dares admit this because it highlights how utterly arbitrary all of these social norms are, and defuses that heady feeling of moral righteousness (to say nothing of the potential for profit) that comes from being a member of a majority that can impose its will on everyone else.

Hm, I am feeling pretty outraged, angry and embarrassed, and I'm about to suffer serious injury from this insurmoutable urge I feel to beat my head against a wall. I wonder if I can sue Terri Carlin for damages.

I see right through you

Josh Marshall has figured it out:


Besides tax cuts and parceling out pork to favored constituencies, there's very little this White House does in domestic policy that isn't for short-term political gain, regardless of the consequences.


Now let's hope the rest of the American electorate does the same before November 7. I wouldn't bet my life savings on it.

Life immitates art

It took almost twenty years for the real world to become like Terry Gilliam's Brazil, but only two years for Minority Report to morph from fiction to fact :


In a new twist, President Bush suggested today that Saddam Hussein's intent to surreptitiously acquire weapons of mass destruction was sufficient grounds for the Iraq war that ousted the dictator from power.

Ronstradamus prognosticates

I would like to note for the record that this post was written before the Super Bowl.

:-)

There must be a pony in here somewhere

Rummy says WOMDs may still be found in Iraq.

You gotta give him this: the man's an optimist.

Then there's this:


Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, and other Democrats on the committee reminded Rumsfeld that in September 2002 he said "we know" where weapons of mass destruction are stored in Iraq.

Explaining that remark, Rumsfeld told the panel that he was referring to suspected weapons sites, but he acknowledged that he had made it sound like he was talking about actual weapons.

The remark "probably turned out not to be what one would have preferred, in retrospect," he said.


It was actually clear at the time that the Administration could not possibly have known where the weapons were. Remember, there were still UN weapons inspectors on the ground at the time. If the Administration really knew where the weapons were they could have cemented the case for war by simply giving this information to the UN. That they didn't proves that they didn't know. Furthermore, it proves that they knew they didn't know, which means they lied through their teeth when they said they did know.

The credibility of our nation has been irrecoverably undermined. Who is going to believe us the next time we cry Wolf of Mass Destruction?

Better late than never

Someone close to the Bush administration has finally figured it out: "'If you cannot rely on good, accurate intelligence that is credible to the American people and to others abroad, you certainly cannot have a policy of pre-emption,'" says David Kay. Too bad it took a year (to say nothing of over 500 dead American soldiers and God only knows how many Iraqi civilian lives -- last estimate I heard was 'over 10,000'.)

A test of character

It's a little stale now, but I just wanted to go on the record saying that Jacques Chirac's proposal to ban head scarves and other ostensible religious symbols in French public schools is a really bad idea. It's so bad I can't even muster the words to describe how bad I think it is. It's bad. El stinko. What was he thinking? There is no difference whatsoever between banning head scarves and forcing people to wear them. Either measure is repugnant to a free society.

Now, here's a test of character: if you agree that requiring women to wear head scarves in public is unacceptably oppressive, would you say the same of laws requiring women to cover their breasts?

It's white on one side

Although Siegfried Hecker is not officially speaking for the U.S. government it is hard to believe that a former head of the Los Alamos National Lab doesn't have some connection to the Bush Administration. In any case, it is quite a spectable watching Dr. Hecker bend over backward to avoid saying the North Korea is actively developing nuclear weapons at the same time that the Dubya is still tying himself into semantic knots insisting that Iraq did have WOMD. ("Weapons of mass destruction-related program activities" is a phrase destined for the history books, right along with, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.")


When Hecker expressed skepticism about North Korean claims, technicians produced a heavy glass jar containing a funnel-shaped piece of metal that was "blackish with a rough surface," he said. A metallurgist who has spent decades working with plutonium, Hecker said the North Koreans allowed him to hold the jar in gloved hands. In contrast to everything else in the laboratory, the jar was warm, and it "seemed about right in terms of weight," Hecker said. When he took off the gloves, the North Koreans ran a Geiger counter over them to check for radioactivity. The counter went off.

"The bottom line is: It was consistent with the way plutonium looks," Hecker said, "but I still cannot say with 100% certainty that it was plutonium.


It reminds me of an old joke:

Four learned fellows are on a train traveling through Scotland, each trying to outdo the other in being factual and precise.

At one stage, the first looks out the window, and spying an animal on the field nearby, claims, "All the sheep in Scotland are white!"

The second replies, "No, SOME of the sheep in Scotland are white."

The third retorts, "No, AT LEAST ONE of the sheep in Scotland is white."

They all look at the fourth, daring him to improve on the last statement.

He thinks for a second, and replies, "At least one of the sheep in Scotland is white ON ONE SIDE."

While this exchange is going on, a fifth man is walking through the train car. He overhears the exchange and stops. He looks out the window, sees the sheep disappear in the distance, and says quietly, "At least one of the sheep in Scotland is white on one side part of the time."

Poor Dubya

Pity poor George Bush. Now on top of everything else he has to deal with, the Shiites in Iraq are demanding (can you imagine?) elections! Don't those ingrates know we've already got our hands full trying to bring them freedom and democracy? Elections! Heaven forfend! If there were actually elections in Iraq they might vote for leaders who would turn Iraq into (shudder) an Islamic state like Iran! Don't they understand that we can't take that kind of a risk? (Jewish states and Christian states are OK, but Islamic states are breeding grounds for terrorists. We can't have that.)

No, I do not envy President Bush. How to bring democracy to Iraq without taking the risk that the Iraqi people will actually have some say in how things turn out -- now that is a pickle. But I have every faith that he'll figure it out. After all, he already did it once in the U.S.

Blogspeak is dead. Long live blogspeak.

Blogspeak, the service I was using to host blog comments, has gone kaput. All the comments have supposedly been transferred over to haloscan, but I need to change my blog template and I don't have time to do it right now. But if you're itching to say something about one of my posts check back in a day or two.

Kudos to Harry for carrying on with Blogspeak for as long as he did.

One small step for Big Brother

The Supreme Court has taken yet another step towards transforming the United States into a police state.

A requiem for Paul O'Neill

The main question I have about Paul O'Neill is not what possessed him to reveal what he knows about the Bush administration but rather how such an apparently hopelessly naive individual ever rose as far as he did. The most striking quote from the Sixty Minutes interview was this: "I can't imagine that I'm going to be attacked for telling the truth."

Are you kidding me? You're a cabinet member in the Administration with the most reckless disregard for the truth since Nixon, and you can't imagine that you're going to be attacked? I'm not even a politician and I figured out long ago that the biggest lie we tell our kids is that honesty is the best policy. Honesty is almost never the best policy. The key to life is to know when and how to lie, beginning with telling Aunt Agatha how delicious her homemade quince pie is, and thank you so very much for making it.

Well, maybe O'Neill is right. Maybe he won't be attacked because he will be perceived as such a buffoon that no one will take his revelations seriously anyway, which is a shame because O'Neill provides actual evidence to support the long-standing speculation that the Bush Administration was determined to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and that the tragic events of that day merely provided an convenient cover story to sell the idea to the American people.

And yet, Bush's approval rating is still at a record high. P.T. Barnum was right.

Putting the lie to the Big Three

Yesterday I went to my local Toyota dealership to test drive a Prius hybrid. But I wasn't able to because there's a five month long waiting list to get one.

This seems to indicate that the Big Three auto makers' claims that Americans just don't buy small fuel-efficient cars is hogwash. Maybe we just don't buy bad fuel efficient cars, but if you give us half a chance to buy a fuel efficient car that's reliable, performs reasonably well, and doesn't look too goofy we'll beat a path to your door.

I'm now leaning towards the new Mazda3. It's an economy car that doesn't look or feel like an economy car. I need to replace my ten year old G20, which was also an economy car (I bought it because it cost less than a Honda Accord) that didn't look or feel like an economy car. It's a shame Infiniti doesn't make a small car any more or I'd buy another one in a heartbeat. It's kind of nice to have the cachet of a luxury nameplate without the luxury price tag. The G20 was also rock-solid reliable. In ten years I've never had a single problem with it. (Actually, that's not quite true. I did have the brake light switch fail on me. The replacement part cost me $10 and it took me about ten minutes to swap it out.)

The only thing even remotely comparable to the G20 nowadays are the BMW 3-series and the Lexus IS300. Yes, these are both nicer than the G20, but are they $10,000+ nicer? Not to me. Besides, it's really hard to justify shelling out $32k for an IS300 or a Beemer when you can get a G35 for $5k less. Trick is, I need a car that I can park in a compact space, and the G35 is just too damn big. Other than that it's a great car. I got to drive one as a loaner when my G20 was having an oil change (that's one of the nice perks of owning an Infiniti) and it was just a dream to drive. I took it up a windy mountain road and I was able to go around the curves so fast that I was making myself seasick without even approaching the car's handling limits.

Oh well, gotta leave something to aspire too. Of course, there's always the Acura NSX...

Oh what a tangled web we weave

I listened to Terry Gross's interview of David Frum and Richard Perle yesterday. Frum and Perle are two self-described hardliners and architects of the Bush Administration's Iraq policy. Their basic position was this:

1. We (the U.S.) continue to be under grave threat of terrorism from Islamic fundamentalists, and have been for over a decade (c.f. the first WTC bombing in 1993).

2. The source of the threat is widely distributed, and includes (or included) Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudia Arabia, Pakistan, North Korea, and several other countries.

3. A policy of patient diplomacy failed to prevent 9/11, and could therefore reasonably be expected to fail to prevent future and even more horrific attacks using ever more powerful WOMD.

4. Therefore, some kind of pre-emptive military action was not only justified, but necessary to show the world that the U.S. was serious about protecting its security.

You know what? I mostly agree with them.

The problem with the war in Iraq was not so much that it happened, but that it was sold on the basis of (let's be generous) a very serious mistake. Frum and Perle's argument, while it might have been instrumental in forming Adminstration policy, was never made to the American people, or to the rest of the world. The argument that was publicly made was very, very different, to wit, that Iraq 1) possessed WOMD and 2) had extant ties to terrorist organizations and therefore 3) presented an imminent danger to the U.S. and the rest of the world.

That argument was false. We may never know whether it was an honest mistake, or a deliberate deception based on the realization that the real reason for attacking Iraq would almost certainly draw even more widespread condemnation than the one that was actually given. The real reason was, to paraphrase: there's a threat out there somewhere, we don't really know exactly where, but 9/11 has exhausted our reserve of patience and so by God we're going to go out and kick some Muslim fundamentalist ass.

I can see why some people in the Administration thought it might not have flown, and that they had to come up with something else.

Trouble is, we have now painted ourselves into a very serious corner. By attacking a country that 1) was not really the central locus of the threat and 2) on a false pretext, we have now seriously undermined our ability to press the initiative. Making an example of Iraq seems to have been enough to bring Lybia and North Korea in line, but what if it isn't enough to also bring Syria, Pakistan, and (the elephant in the living room) Saudia Arabia around? What if the Taliban re-establish themselves in Afghanistan (a real possibility by the way)? What if we get to the point where we need to kick some more Islamic fundamentalist ass in order to make our point? What then? There are no more Saddam Husseins out there (unless you want to count Serdar Turkmenbashi, but does anyone really think that attacking Turkmensitan next is going to have any effect but to leave all the Isalmic fundamentalists rolling on the floor laughing?)

The problem with attacking Iraq on a false pretext is, as many have pointed out, that there is no exit strategy. I don't mean that in the usual small way, referring to getting our troops out of Iraq. I mean it in a big way, that it leaves us with our hands tied. We laid some implicit ground rules with our rhetoric: it's OK to launch pre-emptive strikes as long as 1) the danger is imminant and 2) the leader is brutal. If it should become necessary to launch another pre-emptive strike against another country in order to win the war on terrorism we will have only two choices. We either have to make the case against another country on the basis of those same ground rules, in which case we will almost certainly fail to do so (the credibility of our intelligence has been seriously undermined), or we have to unilaterally change the rules, in which case the world will almost certainly condemn us. The last person to change the ground rules they set up in order to justify a pre-emptive attack on another country was Adolf Hitler when he invaded Poland in 1939.

Back in the U.S. of A.

Our month-long trip to Australia and New Zealand went off without a hitch (with one minor exception involving a pair of scissors, but that's another story -- see my earlier post). We left Auckland at 8 PM on December 31 and arrived in Los Angeles twelve hours later at 10 AM on ... December 31. Crossing the date line is really weird. (So is seeing the sun in the North, and Orion standing on his head. The world really is round.)

There apparently wasn't room for the plane to park at the terminal building, or maybe this is now procedure for all incoming international flights, but we got off the plane and they herded us all (a full 747's worth) onto busses. The bus was already looking pretty full when my wife and I got on, but they kept packing more and more people in. It was starting to feel like a Tokyo subway when someone said, "We're full, close the doors." The airport employee in charge of loading people onto the busses flew off the handle. "Don't tell me what to do!" she shouted, and just for emphasis she said it three times. The shock among the Kiwis, who are unfailingly polite, was palpable. I was ashamed for my country at that moment.

The airport employee (I'm not sure what her actual job title would be -- bus loader?) was, naturally, black, as were most of the people working customs and security that day. Part of me could understand where she was coming from. Here was a (I presume) poor black woman loading an overwhelmingly white crowd of affluent (I presume) travellers onto a bus when one of them barks what sounds to her like an order: "Close the door, nigger woman!" No, that's not what he said, but I suspect that's what it might have felt like to her. God damn it, she may have thought, this isn't 1864, it's 2004! Black people shouldn't have to take orders from white people any more! Don't tell me what to do! It was a very tense moment.

The really sad part was that there really wasn't any more room on that bus, and in the end there was nothing she could do but comply with the order/request.

We actually saw some hints that similar things happen in Australia with the Bama (which is what the Aborigines call themselves). The Bama are not doing nearly as well as the Maori's in New Zealand. When Europeans arrived, the Maoris were able to adapt. They dropped their tradition of warring amongst themselves, united, and managed to negotiate, by comparison to other indigenous peoples, a pretty good situation for themselves. Today the Maoris are probably, among indigenous peoples who had significant contact with Europeans during the Colonial age, among the best off. The Maori culture and language are thriving. There are Maori radio stations playing Maori rock and roll (even, alas, Maori rap). By comparison, the Bama are invisible. They were never able to unite (probably because Australia is so huge) and so the Europeans had them for lunch. Some of the abuses were truly horrific, not as bad as the institutionalized slavery practiced in the U.S., but in the same ballpark. (Some of these were dramatized in the recent movie "Rabbit-Proof Fence", which I recommend.) Their various languages and cultures are all but invisible to casual inspection. We did visit one Bama cultural center run by a tribe called the Tjapukai (pronounced Jabugai). Outside of that, the only aboriginees we saw were in Cairns, apparently homeless, and being hassled by the (white) police.

In a moment of rare lucidity, one of the Tjapukai, in the midst of a demonstration of how to play a dijeridoo (an astonishingly versatile instrument when played well), launched into a tirade about how Europeans had brainwashed his grandmother with the Bible, and made a joke about his BMW, which stood for "Black Man Walks." There seemed to be no such lantent bitterness among the Maoris. In fact, while in New Zealand I saw a newspaper article reporting poll results that Kiwis (as New Zealanders call themselves) were very optimistic about the future, and that the Maoris were even more optimistic than the national average (despite having lower incomes and life expectancies).

I didn't learn as much about the Bama as I would have liked, in part because we were warned not to raise the topic in polite company. We did learn that they have been in Australia for tens of thousands of years, and no one, not even the Bama themselves, know how they got there.

The Maoris were comparatively recent arrivals in New Zealand, having arrived only about a thousand years ago. They came from the same Polynesian peoples who populated Hawaii, and there are many interesting parallels in both culture and language.

Oops, I'm running late so I'll wrap this up by saying, Kyora! Which is Maori for Aloha. :-)

I'm moving to New Zealand

But shhhh... don't tell anyone. New Zealand is the most consistently beautiful place I have ever seen. It's like Switzerland without the Swiss. But I don't want people to know because if the word gets out everyone will move there and ruin it. Kiwis are legendary for being friendly, and the reputation is well deserved. The countryside is uniformly spectacular, so much so that after two week we found ourselves almost going into beautiful-scenery-overload. "Oh, another waterfall. Ho hum."

New Zealand's one saving grace (after a fashion) is that the weather really sucks, and this may be enough to convince most Californians to stay in California, which is already a lost cause so where's the harm. Oh, and they drive on the wrong side of the road too. It's not that driving on the left is bad per se, but the problem is that you have to work the shifter with your left hand. If God had intended that he would not have made most people right handed, now would he?

(And if your answer to that is: that's why God invented the automatic transmission, my answer is: God did not invent the automatic transmission, God invented the tiptronic tranmission. The automatic was clearly the work of Satan.)

Skeletons in the file drawers?

As long as I'm on the subject of lying scumbag politicians, I am once again having second thoughts about my support of Howard Dean. He impressed me as an honest straight-dealer, but what's with sealing up his gubinatorial records? That just the sort of thing George Bush would do (has done, in fact). I am a stauch advocate of the right to privacy, but not when it comes to records pertaining to public office, and certainly not if you are running for President. The only reason I can imagine him doing it is if he knows that there's a dark secret in those files that will cost him the White House. To quote Baby Herman, the whole thing stinks like yesterday's diapers.

What was that mission again?

While I was in Australia I had time to read two of Michael Moore's books, so it came as no surprise to me when Sixty Minutes reported that we are forcibly dismantling democratically elected local governments in Iraq and putting ex-Baathists in power instead.

If you find that shocking you really need to read "Stupid White Men". There Moore documents (among other things) that the Bush family has close personal ties with the Taliban and the Saudi royal family. I'm not sure what is more shocking, that fact, or the fact that no one knows about it.

Security insanity

The comment on the previous post prompts me to take time out to relate the following anecdote from our trip down under.

We were in Australia and New Zealand for a month, visiting a dozen different places. It was quite the whirlwind tour, and in order to avoid the hassle of waiting for our baggage all the time we decided to pack everything we needed in carry-on luggage. (It can be done!) This presented a logistical problem because my wife wanted to carry a pair of scissors to trim her nails. (For some reason that I don't completely understand she doesn't like to use nail trimmers.) I checked the TSA web site and discovered to my pleasant surprise that scissors are now allowed in carry-on luggage as long as they have blunt tips. So we bought a pair of "safety scissors" as they were called and off we went. It took a little negotiating with the TSA agents at LAX (who apparently had not studied up on the latest list of banned items) but we eventually arrived in Sydney with our scissors intact. When we flew to Melbourne the Aussies didn't even bother to look in our bags. Going from Melbourne to Cairns we discovered, however, that scissors of any kind were in fact prohibited on Australian flights, never mind that we had already managed to smuggle them aboard one flight without even trying (or realizing that's what we were doing). Reluctantly we donated our scissors to the no-doubt burgeoning collection at the Melbourne airport.

Fast forward to Brisbane. "You've got a pair of scissors in your bags," the security agent told us. "No, we don't," we replied, "our scissors were confiscated three flights ago." After a lot of searching and several return trips through the X-ray the security agent finally found an old forgotten hotel sewing kit with a pair of scissors inside. We had no idea they were there. They were all of two inches long, with plastic handles and aluminum blades. (The blades were less than one inch long.) But they took them nonetheless, and gave us a stern lecture about how unwise it was to lie to Australian airport security.

The crowning irony to all this (apart from the fact that these deadly scissors had gone through god only knows how many airport X-rays without raising any concern) is that right next to the sewing kit my wife had a comb that consisted of six rather long (3 inches or so) and fairly sharp steel prongs embedded in a plastic handle. I don't know how much damage you could do with that comb, since I somehow managed to resist the temptation to conduct a relevant experiment on the Australian security guards, but I'm pretty confident that it would be substantially more than you could do with those toy scissors they spent all that effort to locate and confiscate. So I am sad to report that when it comes to security insanity reigns as supreme down under as it does up here in the U.S. of A.

Climbing Mount Email

I'm back from my month-long trip to Australia and New Zealand. I'm eager to tell you all about it, but at the moment I'm still digging out from under a mountain of mail, so in the meantime go read this from Michael Moore.

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.