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.

Ya think?

The Los Angeles Times reports that the U.S. Suspects It Received False Iraq Arms Tips .

"Intelligence officials are reexamining data used in justifying the war. They say Hussein's regime may have sent bogus defectors."

Gee. Who'd have thought?

Christopher Hitchens on the Commandments

Christopher Hutchens offers a devastatingly sardonic critique of the Ten Commandments.

The Price of Freedom

I'm having another existential liberal crisis today.

I have been commuting to work along the same route for about five years. Part of that route takes me along a sparsely travelled four-lane divided highway that runs for about a mile and half. Along this route there is a single T intersection. Two days ago the Powers that Be put up a stop sign at that intersection. So now I have to make two extra stops when I drive to and from work.

Now, this may seem like a trivial gripe, but two extra stops a day start to add up over the years, not just in time, but in wear and tear on my car, extra fuel used, etc. But that doesn't bother me nearly as much as the sheer unnecessariness of it. In five years of driving this road ten times a week I have not once seen more than one car waiting to turn onto the highway. I wouldn't mind stopping if there were a reason for it (like traffic backing up onto the arm of the T), but there isn't. The only reason I have to stop is that someone in the government decided to put a stop sign up. (Actually, I don't really know that it was someone in the government. It's possible that someone put this stop sign up as an elaborate practical joke. But that seems unlikely.)

Now, I believe a certain amount of government regulation is needed. If you removed all the stop signs and all the traffic lights it would be a disaster. But I think we've gone too far, and not just because we have put up one too many stop signs. I think we have gone too far in a much more fundamental way. We seem to have forgotten the concept that freedom has a price, and part of that price is the assumption of risk.

We have become perversely risk-averse. Our attitude towards risk is that safety and security trump all other considerations. After 9/11 we practically trampled ourselves to give up our right to privacy in the name of rooting out terrorists by passing the Patriot act. After the Columbia shuttle accident we wrung our hands over the loss of the crew and wondered what we did wrong, as if the mere fact of their deaths was prima facie evidence that we had in fact done something wrong. People count the dead in Iraq as if at some point we will cross a threshold that will indicate that we did something wrong there too.

Now, I am one of the people who has been counting the dead in Iraq, and I also believe that we did something (actually many things) wrong there too. But the two things have nothing to do with each other. The mistake we made was that we attacked on a false pretense. That was a mistake whether the casualty count was one or one million (or indeed zero). Likewise, whether or not we did something wrong on Columbia has nothing to do with the fact that seven people died. Going into space is risky.

Just like driving a car.

Isn't it odd that when seven people die on the space shuttle we rush to "fix the problem" but when over 100 people die every single day in automobile accidents we barely bat an eye?

This is not to say that people don't care about car safety; obviously they do, and this concern has led over the years to significantly safer cars. But there are ways to make driving even safer. At the extreme, we could completely eliminate deaths in car crashes by eliminating cars, but no one wants that. The cost would be too high. The market weighs all the factors and we have collectively decided that about 50,000 lives a year is an acceptable price to pay for mobility.

But the calculus of the value of a life is much more complex than that. For example, we are only willing to put up with a few hundred deaths a year as the price of being able to fly in airplanes. Why the difference? It has a lot to do with the perception of being in control. When we are behind the wheel we feel as if we control the level of risk that we take on moment-by-moment. When we are in an airplane our lives are in the hands of the pilot, and God only knows what kind of a wacko he might be. (Never mind that the guy driving in the car next to you might be a wacko, or a drunk. As long as your hands are on the wheel you can handle any situation.)

(If you still don't believe the issue is control, imagine if a car company came up with a car that had no steering wheel. Instead it had a computer control system that was proven to reduce the risk of fatal accidents by half. How many people do you think would buy it?)

I think that's the main reason people are so afraid of terrorists. The actual numbers of people killed by terrorists is pretty small (so far) but the sheer randomness of it scares people. It is hard to imagine being less in control. (Of course, the potential for the numbers to get much larger is also a source of legitimate concern.)

Ironically, the principal casualty of our rush to avoid being out of control has been our freedom. We say we are a nation of freedom-loving people, but we seem to have forgotten what that actually means. And we seem to have forgotten that freedom has a price.

Freedom means that you can go where you want to when you want to, read what you want to, say what you want to, worship how you want to, vote for who you want to -- all without fear of the government knocking on your door late at night. But this kind of freedom has a price. For example, the price of freedom of speech is that sometimes you have to hear people say things that you find offensive. The price of freedom of religion is that you have to put up with people who don't believe what you believe. The price of freedom of movement is that you may have to deal with "the wrong kind of people" moving into your neighborhood. The price of freedom to read is that people could get ideas in their heads that you think are dangerous.

Or that are in fact dangerous.

The price of freedom is that individuals are free to be destructive. (And modern technology enables them to be destructive on very large scales.)

There are only two defenses against terrorism. One is to make it impossible to be a terrorist, but that can only be done by becoming a totalitarian society. The other is to become a society where everyone is free to be a terrorist, but no one chooses to be.

Personally I'd rather we worked towards the second option, but we seem to be rushing headlong towards the first by passing things like the Patriot Act, and putting up stop signs where they aren't needed.

If, God forbid, I should ever become a victim of terrorism or a car crash I hope that no one uses my death as a reason to drift closer towards totalitarianism (by, e.g., passing Patriot Act II or putting up more stop signs). I hope that people say that it's too bad I'm gone, but that's the price of freedom. It's a price I would gladly pay.

Why Iraq is not like Vietnam

John Hughes at the Christian Science Monitor writes about Why Iraq is not like Vietnam. Worthwhile reading. Iraq is indeed not like Viet Nam in many important respects, though just how much comfort we should take from that fact alone is not clear.

As an aside, I have always been impressed by the journalistic integrity of the CSM. But for the phrase "Christian Science" (an oxymoron if ever there was one) in the title you'd never know that they were run by a religious organization, and one with some fairly extreme views at that. For being able to do that they have my respect.

Making the blind to see

There has never been a verified case of a prayer restoring a blind person's sight, but now it has been done using stem cells.

Thou shalt not... what?

Don Lattin asks Just which commandments are the 10 Commandments?

Nickel and dimed

CNN notes that "More American service members have now died in Iraq since the end of major combat than during the height of the war."

It is also worth noting that the Iraq war is now the deadlieast U.S. military operation since Viet Nam, recently surpassing the occupation of Beirut which resulted in the deaths of 254 marines in a single terrorist attack.

The total casualty count in Iraq is now 276, which seems like a pretty small number. However, the rate of deaths "per capita" is pretty high. There are about 125,000 U.S. service members in Iraq, which is also a small number in historical terms. The Viet Nam war lasted eleven years, and involved about three million American servicemen, of which 58,184 were killed (at last count). This is a death rate of roughly 0.17% per year. The death rate in Iraq is currently running at 0.44% per year, or roughly 2.5 times what it was in Viet Nam. (Even if you discount the 138 deaths during the initial hostilities and look only at the "steady state" death rate it's still substantially higher than it was in Viet Nam.)

Is Iraq another Viet Nam? Not yet. But neither was Viet Nam six months after it began.

Say it isn't so!

I may have to rethink my support of Howard Dean. I always knew he would eventually say something that I didn't agree with, but this is a Duesy:

"Dean would impose a 'hybrid' constitution, 'American with Iraqi, Arab characteristics. Iraqis have to play a major role in drafting this, but the Americans have to have the final say.' Women's rights must be guaranteed at all levels."

Americans have to have the final say? Oh, Governor Dean, please say you didn't really mean that!

Well ... no.

I was channel-hopping and came across Chris Matthews on CNN's "Hardball" asking a question that went roughly like, "We said we were going to attack Iraq because they were harboring terrorists. We now know that they weren't. We said we were going to attack Iraq because they had weapons of mass destruction. We now know that they didn't. Given all that, isn't it time to admit we made a mistake?"

The guest, a youngish looking fellow with a British accent, replied, "We deposed a brutal totalitarian regime. Surely that was the right thing to do."

To which I reply:

Well ... no.

Getting rid of Saddam was a good outcome. But the ends do not justify the means. One might judge the death of pedophile priest John Geoghan at the hands of fellow prison inmate Joseph Druce to be a good outcome. Or one might judge the death of a abortion doctor to be a good outcome (and a shocking number of people do). That does not make killing abortion doctors and pedophile priests the right thing to do.

If liberating countries living under brutal totalitarian regimes were the right thing to do, then liberating North Korea would be the right thing to do. Liberating Liberia would have been the right thing to do. And one could make a case for Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the elephant in the living room, China.

Bringing down brutal totalitarian regimes is indeed the right thing to do, just as punishing pedophile priests is the right thing to do, and reducing the number of abortions is the right thing to do. But how you do it matters. Summary execution of priests and doctors and even political leaders is never morally justifiable except in cases of imminent danger. That is why the fact that there were no terrorists or WOMD found in Iraq matters. Those were what ostensibly provided the moral justification for attacking Iraq. Without proof that there was in fact an imminent danger our attack on Iraq cannot be morally justified no matter how good the outcome eventually turns out to be.

Still missing the point

The California Supreme Court, along with nearly everyone else, is still missing the point.

The Court has overturned an earllier Appeals Court ruling that publication of the DeCSS algorithm used to encrypt DVD's is protected by the First Amendment. The argument for restricting the distribution of DeCSS is to prevent the illegal copying of DVDs.

The point that everyone is missing is that it is not necessary to decrypt a DVD in order to make an illegal copy. The software to decrypt DVDs is built in to every DVD player. A decrypted copy of a DVD would not work in a standard DVD player. To make an illegal copy of a DVD all you have to do is make a raw copy of the bits on the DVD, encryption and all.

What the fuss is really all about is not restricting the copying of DVDs but restricting the viewing of DVDs. Not all DVDs are created equal. They are encrypted differently depending on where the DVD is intended to be sold. One kind of encryption is used in the U.S. A different kind of encryption is used in Europe. A third kind is used in Asia, and so on. A DVD encrpyted with one of these so-called "region codes" will not work with a DVD player from a different region. This is used by the movie undustry to control the timing of movie releases.

It has also been used by the undustry to suppress the development of DVD-viewing software for the Linux operating system.

If this ruling is allowed to stand it could have very serious consequences. For example, many jurisdictions, particularly in the United States, are seriously considering moving to the use of electronic voting machines based on secret proprietary software. This ruling by the California Supreme Court could be used by the manufacturers of such machines to suppress the dissemination of information about potential weakness in the security of these machines (and all indications are that current incarnations of these machines are very easily compromised).

This ruling is just one in a long string of setbacks for individual free-speech rights in favor of commercial interests. The First Amendment is being dismantled to line the pockets of corporations.

Microsoft Windows: Insecure by Design

The headline of this Washington Post article says it all.

Ron's reviews...

Terry Gilliam's movie "Brazil" is, in my humble opinion, one of the best movies ever made. It was released in 1985, and it is eerily prophetic today nearly twenty years later. (It was originally scheduled to be released in 1984, but was delayed by the Hollywood studio. The story of the ensuing fight makes fascinating reading.)

Brazil takes place in a world where the government has been fighting shadowy terrorists for years. If you want to see what the world could be like ten years from now go watch this movie.

(I highly recommend the three-dvd set which includes the version of the movie that the studio edited. It is a fascinating glimpse into the amazing power of editing to shape a movie, and of studio executives to completely fuck one up.)

Old business

Catching up on some old business, commenting on things that happened before I started keeping this blog, but which are still important.

No Presidential adminstration in the history of the United States has shown such utter contempt for democracy and the truth as that of George W. Bush, and his attorney general John Ashcroft.

There is no principled defense of our attack on Iraq. This is not to say no good has come of it. The world is a better place with Saddam Hussein out of power. But there are lots of people in power that the world would be better off without (including at least one who wants to build up stockpiles of nuclear weapons and has the means to do so).

George Bush led us to war on a false pretext. We now know that Iraq was not an imminent threat to the United States, and was not a haven for terrorists. (Ironically, Iraq seems to harbor more terrorists now than it did before Saddam was deposed.) Whether this was due to deliberate deception or mere incompetence we will probably never know, but it doesn't matter. In a civilized society the ends do not justify the means.

Ironically, it was apparent before the war, and it is even more apparent now, that the real source of terrorism is not Afghanistan nor Iraq, but rather Saudi Arabia. Why are we not attacking them? Not being privy to the deliberations of the Joint Chiefs I obviously don't know the answer to that, but here's a theory: the Saudis are doing a better job of providing themselves with plausible deniability than Iraq or Afghanistan did, and they are relatively pliable with respect to the Bush Administration's desires regarding oil and Israel. I can't prove this, of course, but I submit that this theory is consistent with all the observed data.

(As an interesting side-note, 60 minutes did a story a while back about the fact that the political basis for the United States's suport of Israel comes mainly not from Jews, which make up only a miniscule voting block, but rather from born-again Christians, who want to protect Israel not because it is a democracy, but because its existence as an independent nation is one of the Biblical prerequisites for the Second Coming. (Never mind that the Second Coming is already long overdue.))

In two and a half years George Bush as turned record surpluses into record deficits, alienated our allies, shredded our record of never having been a military aggressor, dismantled personal freedoms in the name of "security", and widened the gulf between rich and poor. In my book he is well on his way to being the worst president this country ever had.

Hope for the world. Or not.

At first I thought there was hope for the world.

"The majority of American voters would not like to see President Bush re-elected to another term according to a poll by Newsweek magazine."

Then I read the next sentence:

"The survey released Saturday showed that 49 percent of registered voters would not back the president for a second term if the vote were held now."

Since when is 49% a majority?

Bill Whittle on Responsibility

Bill Whittle writes an amazingly long-winded essay to make the simple point that the idea of personal responsibility has taken a beating lately. If you have the time it makes interesting reading. I agree with him to a certain extent. Certainly "political correctness" has been taken too far, and people need to learn to be less thin-skinned about things like "offensive speech."

However...

Tale a look around you, wherever you are, and I will wager that what you see are not fields of prairie grass with herds of buffalo raising clouds of dust in the distance, nor virgin forests traced with pristine streams of sweet water, nor even fields of corn or wheat rippling in a gentle breeze. Most likely if you are reading this you spend most of your life in an office or a cubicle, or a car or a train, or a house or an apartment. And most likely these things were not built by you, but by large numbers of other people assembled into organized teams.

Why does this matter? Because Whittle's Utopian vision of rugged individualism and the swift certainty of frontier justice works a lot better on the frontier than it does in the inner city. Out on the frontier there is (or was) a wealth of natural resources that the rugged individual could exploit without offending his fellow man. Need shelter? Cut down a few trees. Need food? Shoot a buffalo.

But in the inner city if you try to cut down the trees (if there are any) you will be arrested, and there are no buffalo. There are very few options for the rugged individual to survive without offending someone because, except for so-called "public spaces", every last bit of it belongs to someone. In fact, in a typical American city you risk arrest simply by attempting to sleep in a space that you haven't paid for.

So I am all for accepting responsibility for one's actions, but that train runs both ways. We as a society have made certain decisions. We have decided to build cities. We have decided to allow companies to control vast tracts of farmland. Don't get me wrong, I think that the world is, on the whole, a better place for having made these decisions. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that these have been collective decisions, that these decisions have consequences, and that by Bill Whittle's own logic we therefore bear collective responsibility for those consequences.

One of the consequences of the corporatization and citification of our world is that it is now barely possible to survive as a rugged individual, and to thrive you have no choice but to submit to "the system" to a certain extent. The self-sustaining hunter-gatherer lifestyle is simply not an option in an overcrowded world.

Bill Whittle asks: "Who controls a nation of free individuals?" and answers, "No one." He's wrong. That might have been true in 1884, but in an overcrowded, industrialized nation of "free" individuals, who controls it is the people with money. The moneyed class didn't control people in 1884 because they had an option: stake your claim to five acres and mule and start farming. Today people dream of saving enough to put a down payment on a quarter acre.

Bill twists history in other ways too. He paints Democrats like Bill and Hillary Clinton as devils lusting after power, and tempting people by offering to relieve them of their responsibilities (and thus their freedoms). But it was not the Democrats who passed the greatest threat to our individual freedoms ever, the so-called "Patriot Act", it was the Republicans. (And they are mostly unrepentant. Donald Rumsfeld is currently on tour to tell everyone how wonderful the Patriot Act is, and that we need to imperil freedom even further in the name of security! To accuse Democrats of wanting to curtail individual freedoms to further their own power is to follow Joseph Goebbel's advice: repeat a lie often enough and people will start to believe it.)

Bill Whittle is right about one thing: with power comes responsibility. But he is utterly mistaken when he implies that this bargain runs only one way.

1,2,3... or something like that

Question: how many people died in the September 11 World Trade Center attacks?

Answer: It depends on how you count.

If you do a Google search on "september 11 victims count" the first result is this page which gives the following figures:

New York: 2795
Washington: 189
Pennsylvania: 44
Total: 3028

Seems pretty definitive. But the "New York" figure of 2795 is broken down into the following:

World Trade Center: 2801
American Airways Flight #11: 92 (includes all passengers & crew)
United Airways Flight #175: 65 (includes all passengers & crew)

Note that 2801+92+65 = 2958, not 2795. In fact, the figure given for the World Trade Center alone is more than the total given for New York. Obviously, not all of these number can be correct.

The World Trade Center figure of 2801 is explained like this:

(includes 94 missing, body not recovered and no application filed for a death certificate; 1,430 death certificates issued with a body; 1,309 death certificates issued without a body; 56 persons are still listed as "missing")

Obviously, at least one of these numbers must be wrong. Trying to figure out which one (or if it is only one) makes an interesting little puzzle. For example, 1430+1309+56=2795, which is the New York total, but the site says that the WTC figure "includes 94 missing". In any event, it's probably safe to say that about 3,000 people died. (This is absolutely astonishing to me. The WTC towers normally have 40,000 people in them on a typical business day. I remember saying on 9/11 that I would be surprised if the death toll had only four digits, which is to say, if it was below 10,000. Not only was it below 10,000, it was way below 10,000.)

Counting things is not always so easy. How many people voted for George Bush in Florida in the 2000 presidential election? How many people were killed by cigarettes last month? How many by gunshot wounds?

The definitive data for mortality is collected by the CDC. According to the CDC, in 2001, 2,417,798 people died in the United States. That's an average of 6,624 deaths per day. The 9/11 attacks, as horrific as they were, increased the number of deaths on that day only by about 50%, and for the year only by 0.15%. I do not want to diminish the unspeakable horror and evil (real evil this time, not the ironic hyperbole I intended when I used the word to describe Microsoft) of those acts, but in terms of numbers, the casuality count of 9/11 was barely a blip.

19,727 people died of homicide in the United States in 2001. (This does not include the deaths from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which are listed separately. The CDC counts, by the way, are 3074 "total deaths" and "2957 death certificates issued", but this apparently includes a few people who died after 9/11 as a result of injuries sustained (at least that's my guess - the report is not entirely clear on this.) The CDC also includes the terrorists themselves in their count, and classifies their deaths as suicides.)

Every two months in the United States as many people die from homicide as were killed by terrorists on 9/11. More or less.

14,132 people died of "HIV disease" in the U.S. 2001, fewer than died of homicide. 921,819 people died of "major cardiovascular diseases". 553,251 people died of "malignant neoplasms" which is the fancy academic term for cancer. 41,967 people died in motor vehicle accidents. 51,796 people died in "non-transport accidents", which includes things like falls (14,543), accidental poisoning (12,030), and "accidental discharge of firearms" (924, which by now should look like an awfully small number).

18,962 people died from "drug-induced deaths." 19,423 died from "alchohol-induced deaths."

29,423 people died of "Intentional self-harm (suicide)."

The report doesn't list it as a line item, but an average of 93 people die each year in the U.S. from lighning strikes.

Now, for extra credit, how many people have died in the United States military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq?

That is a very hard question to answer for several reasons. First, the count is still climbing even as I write this. Second, no one keeps track, although a few people are trying to keep tabs on the civilian casualties. Some sample data from their efforts: somwhere between 6096 and 7807 Iraqi civilian deaths and around 3500 Afghan civilian deaths.

So... should we be be worried about HIV and terrorism? It depends on how you count.

Requiem for free speech

Think the First Amendment ensures your right to free speech? Think again.

"Federal prosecutors in California ... put a man in prison for disclosing a website security hole to the people at risk from it."

The Talmud on second-guessing God

Someone named Steve took me to task over on Rand Simberg's blog for (among other things) not providing a reference in my inaugural post for my claim that the Talmud supports second-guessing God. Here is my support for that claim.

I also added this link to the original post.

I'm shocked! Shocked!

Well, no, not really. The east-coast blackout actually came as no surprise to me at all, nor to most scientists and engineers. The blackout was the inevitable consequence of society's general attitude of benign neglect towards its infrastructure until some crisis forces people to pull their heads out of the sand (and possibly other places). You can see this happening over and over in just about every aspect of our society: computing, the space shuttle, financial markets, roads and bridges, public health, education.... Everything nowadays seems to be driven by a push towards higher efficiency and short-term returns. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. The problem is that one can often achieve the appearance of short term gains in efficiency by increasing hidden costs, or taking on hidden risks. You can improve your bottom line for a while by scrimping on margin, or maintenance, or insurance (or by forcing your customers to wait idly on the phone line waiting for a service representative rather than vice versa) but the longer you do the more likely it will come back to bite you in a big way later on. That we are taking on all these additional risks doesn't bother me (I think that we've generally become far too risk-averse) as much as that we seem to be doing it with our eyes closed.

Standards of proof

In my inaugural post I advocated that people do their own experiments. Unfortunately, designing a good experiment, and interpreting the results of experiments, are not always easy things to do.

For example, Dr. Larry Sparks fed cholesterol to rabbits and found that the rabbits had a higher incidence of Alzheimer-like symptoms than rabbits where were not fed cholesterol. Does this prove that cholesterol causes Alzheimer-like symptoms in rabbits? It would seem to be a reasonable conclusion to draw, until Sparks moved his lab from Kentucky to Arizona and found that he could no longer reproduce his results. Why should cholesterol cause Alzheimer symptoms in Kentucky but not in Arizona?

The answer turns out to be that it is not cholesterol by itself that causes the Alzheimer symptoms, but cholesterol in conjunction with copper found in tap water. In Arizona they used bottled water, which did not contain copper. When they added copper to the bottled water the Alzheimer symptoms returned.

This is why to get reliable scientific results you have to be very careful. In particular, it is important to do control experiments in order to be sure that the effects you see are the result of what you are focusing your attention on (cholesterol) and not the result of some random thing that isn't on your radar screen at all (tap water). It is also important to do proper statistical analysis of results in order to separate real effects from random coincidences. Even with all these precautions it is still possible to be mislead. The original Kentucky studies were properly controlled and produced statistically significant results, but they still did not paint a complete picture of the situation. In fact, it is entirely possible that we still don't have the complete picture, because there could be additional factors that both the Kentucky and Arizona labs have in common that all contribute to the production of Alzheimer symptoms in rabbits that just haven't been noticed yet.

Statistics can also be misleading. The usual standard for statistical significance in scientific publications is a 95% confidence level. This does not mean that there is a 95% chance that the result is "correct" or "proves your theory". It means that there is only a 5% chance (or less) that the results you see were caused purely by random chance. Conversely, it means that there is a 95% chance that the results you see were caused by something other than random chance, but by itself the 95% confidence figure does not tell you what that other thing was. Note by the way that 95% sounds like a pretty high number, but you have to compare it to the nunber of experiments being done. 95% confidence means that about 1 experiment in 20 will give you a false positive result, that is, a result that looks real but was in fact caused purely by random chance. Multiple that proportion by the tens of thousands of experiments that are being done and you see that it is a virtual certainty that some of the results floating around out there are in fact false positives. Most of these get corrected when other labs try to reproduce the results. Every time you reproduce a result the probability that this is due to random chance shrinks. It doesn't take many reproductions before this probability shrinks to insignificance.

However (and this is a big however) for this to work it is important not to cherry-pick your results. If you do an experiment 100 times and you get a positive result at a 95% significance level five times this is almost certainly due to random chance. (That's exactly what 95% signifiance means: you expect to get five false positives for every 100 experiments that you do).

All this is prelude to the $64,000 question, about which I expect to he writing quite a bit: does HIV cause AIDS? I am actually not so much interested in the answer to that question as I am in the process by which one arrives at an answer, and what one can accept as a standard of proof. I have been looking into this issue for nearly ten years now as a mostly disinterested observer in the following sense: I am not HIV positive, nor is anyone I know with the exception of Christine Maggiore, and I do not know her very well. (We have met once, and we've exchanged some emails, that's all.) So I do not have a personal stake in whether the answer to the question is yes or no. What I do care about is that the answer be correct, and from what I've been able to tell so far the consensus view on the causal relationship between HIV and AIDS is at best highly oversimplified, not unlike the simple conclusion that cholesterol causes Alzheimer's disease.

More on this (probably much more) later.

China will be the next Japan

On a related note to that last post, I predict that China will be the next Japan, that is, that China will do to the computer industry in the 00's what Japan did to the car industry in the 70's and 80's. The reason is very simple: China is innovating and the U.S. isn't. And the reason the U.S. isn't is that no one can make money in software without permission from Bill Gates. Seriously. The minute a new software innovation starts to make enough money to get on Microsoft's radar they are finished. First, Microsoft will offer to acquire them (which is the best outcome any innovator in the United States can hope for) but at a lowball price. If they refuse, then Microsoft simply destroys them, either by strongarming OEMs, by developing a similar product and bundling it with Windows, or by making changes to Windows that break the innovator's software, or a combination of the three. This is why the U.S. software industry is moribund, because most people smart enough to produce a software innovation are also smart enough to realize that it's a waste of time.

Why aren't Macs more popular?

Bob Cringely points out the obvious reason that Windows and Linux are more popular than Macinoshes: Macs are too easy to use, so IT departments will not recommend Macs because it will put them out of a job.

Microsoft is one of the most evil entities on the face of the planet, and not just because they are crooks. It's much, much worse than that. Because of Microsoft an entire generation of people has grown up believing that operating system crashes and computer viruses are just part of the Way the World Is. Even today, with Linux and Mac OS X as proof that reliable virus-free software is possible, most people I know seem to be incapable of conceiving a world where Microsoft, system crashes, and anti-virus software are not an integral part of daily life. To my mind, people who defend Microsoft are not unlike the slaves who fought on the side of the South during the civil war. They toil in the fields (or the cubicles as the case may be) while Massa Bill over in the Big House pockets the fruits of their labor.

I feel sorry for them. It's not their fault.

Boojums All the Way through

For anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of relativity and quantim mechanics, David Mermin's Boojums All the Way through is an excellent and entertaining place to start.

Dave prognosticates

A fellow named Dave prognosticates thusly:

"It occurred to me during my travel that if you want to see America's future, you don't need to imagine Orwell's boot-stomping-on-a-human-face metaphor - you just have to visit an airport. The omnipresent surveillance, the variety of pass-cards and restricted areas, the overpriced bad food, the kindergarten safety-scissorsizing of anything that might savagely clip a pilot's toenails, the constant repetition of recorded voices over loudspeakers, the superstitious courtesy to security guards who can ruin your day on a whim - these are all features that are coming to a shopping mall near you, then to your school or business park, then to your downtown or your gated community."

I think he's right.

The rest of the blog also makes interesting reading. In a nutshell, he advocates living a low-income ascetic lifestyle in order to avoid paying income tax. Unlike most income tax avoidance schemes this one is actaully legal, though it takes some self-discipline to actually put it into practice (unless, of course, like millions of people you have no choice because you're poor).

The hosting site also seems to be full of interesting links, including this one.

Why be mad at the Jews?

The recent hubub over the new Mel Gibson movie, "Passion", brings to mind something that has always puzzled me. According to Christian doctrine, Jesus died on the cross to save us from sin and eternal damnation. That sounds to me like a good thing. Why then be angry with the Jews for killing Him? (I know, I know, it wasn't the Jews, it was the Romans, but that has never stopped people from being mad at the Jews.) I mean, if the Jews (or whoever it was) hadn't killed Jesus He might have grown old and died of cholera or some other unpoetic natural cause, and we might all be condemned to roast in hell forever. If any emotion at all is justified (and that is highly questionable 2000 years after the fact) it should be gratitude, not anger. But Christianity has never let logic get in the way of a good witch hunt.

The fundamentalist Christian outlook on life is full of this sort of hypocrisy. For example, if you really believe that your soul is saved and that when you die you go to spend eternity with God, then death ought to be something to be embraced, even rejoiced, not avoided and mourned. And yet it is fundamentalist Christians who are typically at the forefront of "right to life" movements. I don't get it. Why is life such a big deal when you have the afterlife to look forward to?

You actually find this more sanguine attitude towards death in Eastern philosophies, particularly Zen Buddhism. Also, Muslims have lately managed to convince a fair number of young and impressionable people of the foregoing logic to unfortunate (in my opinion) effect. One of the nice things about not believing in an afterlife is that you don't have to wrestle with these issues. This life has value because that's all there is.

Some of my best friends are Black -- er, Gay

Since I'm a freeloader there are ads at the top of my blog. These are served up by Google, which apparently scans my blog to choose relevant ads. The choices that Google makes are fascinating. At the moment, there's an open letter to John Crossman defending the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and a Lesbian and Gay blog list, which is interesting because I haven't said a thing about lesbian or gay issues. But since Google raised the topic, I'll say something now.

Watching the recent furor over the Anglican Church's approval of an openly gay bishop I feel like I've been transported back to 1947 watching the furor over Jackie Robinson becoming a Brooklyn Dodger. The arguments for discriminating against gays and lesbians are just as prevalent and just as bankrupt as the arguments for discriminating against blacks were in 1947.

The arguments for discriminating against gays seem to fall into three major categories:

1. Biblical prohibitions against homosexuality (e.g. Romans 1:26-27, I Corinthians 6:9, and many others). For me, of course, being non-Judeo-Christo-Islamic-theist, what the Bible has to say about this carries no more weight than what the Kama Sutra has to say about it, or the Q'uran, or the Baghwan Bible, or Beowulf. But as an interested observer of those who do put stock in these things I find it fascinating how deeply in denial people can be about the fact that they pick and choose those parts of Scripture that suits them, and rationalize away the rest. For example, I have yet to meet a person who professes to be a Christian who takes I Corinthians 14:34, or even the Second Commandment, seriously.

(The Second Commandment, incidentally, makes an interesting case study. It says (Exodus 20:4), "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth." Anyone who has ever taken a photograph has made a "likeness" of something that was "in the earth beneath." Muslims, by the way, really take the second Commandment seriously, and that is why you only see abstract art in Mosques, never portraits. One can quibble over whether the intent of the second Commandment was not to prohibit family photos but rather to prohibit idol worship. Still, I have to wonder at the capacity for rationalization of Catholics who bow down before statues of Mary and the Saints. But I digress.)

(Digression #2: I have never understood how those who advocate posting the Ten Commandments in government buildings in the U.S. can keep a straight face when they argue that it is a cultural and not a religious text. Have none of them ever bothered to read them? Commandment #1 says, "I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me." It's hard to imagine how you could get any more religious than that. But I digress again.)

In any case, regardless of your stand on what the Bible does and does not condemn, there is supposed to be separation of Church and State in the United States, and so the issue of what the Bible does or does not say is moot when it comes to decisions of public policy. This, of course, says nothing about whether it was correct for the Anglicans to induct Gene Robinson as a bishop. That is for them to decide. For what it's worth (which ought to be very little since I'm not an Anglican) I think they did the right thing.

2. Approval, whether tacit or overt, of the "homosexual lifestyle" (whatever that means) contributes to the unraveling of the fabric of society. I simply see no evidence that this is true, or at least, that the contribution of gays to the unraveling of society is miniscule compared to the rips and tears that have been made by non-homosexuals. It was by and large heterosexual priests who molested young children in the Catholic church, and heterosexual bishops and cardinals who covered it up. It is heterosexuals (exclusively, since gays are not allowed to marry) who produce the more than 50% divorce rate we have in this country. From my own personal experience, all of the gays I know are to a man (and a woman) fine and decent people. The idea that gays contribute disproportionately to societal ills is untenable.

3. Homosexuality is "unnatural." Rand Simberg has debunked this notion thoroughly in his blog though I don't have time to look up the exact reference at the moment. Suffice it to say this idea is also untenable. Many animals (notably chimps and dolphins) engage in homosexual behavior.

A related argument is that homosexual couples should not be given societal support because they do not produce children. This argument is also so untenable I'm amazed that anyone can advance it with a straight face. First off, it simply isn't true. Homosexuals are perfectly capable of reproducing, and many do. But even if it were true, if one were to take reproduction as the gold standard of what does and does not deserve societal sanction then infertile people, or people who do not wish to have children, should be prohibited from marrying on those grounds. The argument is just so ridiculous it feels like a waste of time to even bring it up.

There are no tenable grounds for denying equal rights to homosexuals, just as there are no (and never were any) tenable grounds for denying equal rights to blacks. This one is a complete no-brainer. Why does it have to take so long for society to figure these things out?

It verks!

The problem with blogspeak has been fixed. Thanks to Harry Wynn, the developer of blogspeak, for his lightning-quick turnaround. It took less then five minutes between when I sent him an email describing the problem and when he fixed it. Kudos!

Bummer :-(

Blogspeak doesn't seem to work.

Testing testing...

Trying to set up the BlogSpeak comment system...

The cat's out of the bag

Since my blog has now been linked from one that people actually read (thanks Rand!) I supposed I'd better get ready for visitors. Hi everyone, and thanks for reading my blog. You will notice a few indications that I'm new at this and don't really know what I'm doing yet. For example, the link in the earlier article entitled "You morons!" has a broken link, which makes it very confusing. For the record, that link went to a Los Angeles Times story about the Democrats in the California legislature plotting to delay the overdue budget for political gain -- while an active microphone was broadcasting their conversation all over the state Capital building. Strange, but true.

Another item that's missing is a feedback/comments mechanism, or any way to get in touch with me. I'm still trying to figure out how to add comments to this blog. In the meantime, you can get in touch with me at: ron at vegiemail.com. I'd be particularly interested in getting advice from experience bloggers on how best to add comments to my blog. Thanks in advance.

A final note: yes, I am being intentionally coy about my identity. This is because some of the things I plan to write here could be detrimental to my career if certain people learned of them. If you do learn my True Name I would appreciate it if you did not advertise it.