According to the Christian Science Monitor, Uzbekistan has a terrorism problem. With Islam Karimov as Exhibit #1 why the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with Saddam's human rights violations, Uzbekistan presents a problem of popular politics: though the terrorists are not on the side of freedom or democracy, they are fighting for the same short-term goal. The terrorists can use the same rhetoric and align the popular concepts of freedom and democracy with their own agenda as countless authoritarians have in the past, and even pick up recruits who just want Karimov out and don't see any better opportunities. Realpolitikally, expect that people peacefully struggling for freedom in Uzbekistan, if there are any left, are going to be sacrificed as a condition of Karimov's continued alliance.
Meanwhile in Iraq, the Iraqi people are welcoming us as liberators in Falluja the same way the Somalis did. I wouldn't be surprised if someone took hints from Somalia to lead the crowd to desecration, but if the reports all over the news are at all accurate, the whole town got involved. Of course, how accurate can the reports be when newsmen in the area were also attacked? If anyone's forgotten Brent Sadler's attempted foray into Tikrit, it's worth noting again that the US Army isn't the only organization in the world which fires on independent newsmen. As for the dead themselves, what in the world were "civilians" doing anywhere near Falluja? The only nonenlisted Americans going near that town would be mercenaries, spies, peace activists, or idiots. Given one report, they worked for Blackwater Security, a merc firm which also does police training and the Navy's antiterrorism program, among other things. The media should stop making them out to be businessmen. They died in the line of duty.
Just a quickie here. In this article from Deutsche Welle, and many other sites as usual, talking about the aid program slowly getting set up for Afghanistan since the Taliban's removal in 2001.
The story itself is fairly standard - Afghanistan finally got a generous aid package pledged, although it remains to be seen whether it will be followed through on (the US has been slacking off on its obligations, as have other countries). There's also the issue of whether the aid packages will be around as long as they should be to help out on a major way.
What struck me about the article (which I originally saw in the BBC's pages, but they updated the URL with a revised one and I lost the old one - doh!) wasn't the size of the aid or the fact of the pledges or the question of their continuance. What struck me was how Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani described what the goal is:
Afghanistan is one of the world's poorest country's. Some four million of its 25 million population live on less than 50 U.S. cents a day, Ghani said during the conference."Our priority is precisely to ensure a move from abject poverty to poverty with dignity -- at least a dollar a day," he told reporters.
"From abject poverty to poverty with dignity," followed by what they want to get it to that point. These are very modest expectations, and they're expectations which need to be met on the way to any longer-term goals anyway. Anyway, it was the mix of fatalism, realism and modesty of that statement which struck me, and I felt I should pass it on to you guys.
First, on a topic totally unrelated to the subject at hand, Canada's National Post won my Loaded Headline Award of the Day the other day for "Democracy Divides Arab League." Just thought I'd get that out, to place alongside "Science Goes Too Far" and "Globalization Cures Poverty." I'm just sayin'.
Anyway, the BBC once again reported something that's gotten me doing the standard jawdrop thing.
Researchers at Imperial College and University College, London have already successfully implanted corrective genes in foetal mice.They now hope to use the technique on human foetuses, and say it could help cure inherited diseases such as haemophilia.
Now, this is obviously an experimental thing, mice not being humans. The Big Deal about this, though, is the fact that researchers have successfully modified a fetal genome while it was still in the womb. The BBC article spells out the implications pretty clearly, and I agree with them that this is something both Huge and Potentially Very Good. This paves the way to general genefixing procedures that could make a lot of truly lasty congenital diseases a thing of the past.
Almost as doubletake-worthy as the breakthrough itself is the tool they're using for it. Making use of disarmed retrovirii for one procedure or another is nothing new, and variants of it go back over a century for things like vaccination. Despite the fact that the principle's nothing new, I still can't help but be boggled by the fact that they're taking HIV - HIV of all things - and beating it into a plowshare to perform acts almost the total opposite of its original intent. There's a few other metaphors in there, probably, but I can't think of them right off the top of my head. Either way, the use of that retrovirus of all the ones out there - because of its malignant nature making it so much more effective at its new job - is one of the things which turns this from something that's merely really cool to a work of artistry.
Of course, the standard response to this sort of thing is to say that It Raises Ethical Questions, usually with the implication that Ethical Questions Only Imply Bad So Let's Proscribe This Now. I find this kind of thought to sit somewhere on the line between counterproductive and actively evil, so I can never resist the opportunity to view it with the contempt it deserves.
Stuff like this will become the norm in medicine in the next generation or so. The only real way this wouldn't be the case would be if the entire world got together and started declaring fields of knowledge and their preqrequites to be illegal; this obviously isn't going to happen. That should happen is a calm and open discussion of the implications of this sort of technology - preferably devoid of loaded phrases like "playing God" - so that people can come to a conclusion of what their stance is on things like these without relying on kneejerk and soundbites. Considering the tendency in a lot of countries to go full-out kneejerk these days - technically, it's illegal to learn about stem cells in the United States right now, for instance - I'm not entirely confident on society's ability to do this, but anyone who is thinking with a level head about it is one less person who isn't.
My personal stance on this is that the potential benefits of this sort of thing far outweigh the potential risks, and that it stands to set off a revolution in medicine not seen since in generations, to say nothing of millenia. There are potential problems and risks with genefixing as well - eugenics concerns, particularly with regard to screening mental illnesses (or the idea, false but popular, that you should be able to screen for politics, beliefs, etc) and the (equally silly, IMO) concept of government-mandated screening for "ideal" human beings - something the objectors never define - are the main ones.
The idea of screening in nonproductive ways is an issue, however, as is the issue of treating things like congenital mental illnesses in this way, considering the nuances of such things have yet to be worked out. On the other hand, nobody's saying we have to start zotting schizophrenia or whatnot out of the genome right away. However, people who advocate the retention of hemophilia or progeria in a developing fetus are little more than fools anyway. So once this process is nailed down to the point where it can work on humans, we should go right the hell ahead with fixing that sort of thing while we determine what to do about the stickier issues.
Such technology definately goes on the list of things that can help build a finer world. The problem is that of responsible use, coupled with any number of other tools that we're beginning to reach towards. People who know me know that I'm a fairly enthusiastic transhumanist, thereby a technophile by definition; of course I'm going to say these sorts of things, whether it be for genetic engineering, molecular assemblers, manned spaceflight on scales both large and small, artificial intelligence, or much of anything else. At the same time, I don't believe technology can solve our problems. That has to come from within us.
Like nuclear power, computers, spacecraft, aircraft, steam power, antibiotics, metallurgy, agriculture, the wheel, flint-knapping, fire and sentience itself, this new wave of technology is a tool. For good or ill, it heralds change, and I'd rather be on the side that comprehends it than the side which flees or fights anything they don't immediately understand.
Just a quickie here before I head off. here, via the BBC:
Chen says Taiwan 'independent'
Taiwan's re-elected President Chen Shui-bian has said the island should be seen as an "independent country", in comments likely to anger China.
It's possible to get more explicit about that, but it takes a bit of work. W'uh-oh.
Found this on an open thread over on Making Light:
from the US Death Penalty Blooper Reel:
31. July 8, 1999. Florida. Allen Lee Davis. "Before he was pronounced dead ... the blood from his mouth had poured onto the collar of his white shirt, and the blood on his chest had spread to about the size of a dinner plate, even oozing through the buckle holes on the leather chest strap holding him to the chair."45 His execution was the first in Florida's new electric chair, built especially so it could accommodate a man Davis's size (approximately 350 pounds). Later, when another Florida death row inmate challenged the constitutionality of the electric chair, Florida Supreme Court Justice Leander Shaw commented that "the color photos of Davis depict a man who -- for all appearances -- was brutally tortured to death by the citizens of Florida."46 Justice Shaw also described the botched executions of Jesse Tafero and Pedro Medina (q.v.), calling the three executions "barbaric spectacles" and "acts more befitting a violent murderer than a civilized state."47 Justice Shaw included pictures of Davis's dead body in his opinion.48 The execution was witnessed by a Florida State Senator, Ginny Brown-Waite, who at first was "shocked" to see the blood, until she realized that the blood was forming the shape of a cross and that it was a message from God saying he supported the execution.49
(emphasis mine)
I...just... holy SHIT. "A message from God saying he supported the execution."
I think we need to pull off and nuke the country from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Two bits of news for you today. There'd be more, but that would involve making someone do my paper for me so I can get more writing done here. Le sigh.
Anyway, first, one of the other Zoners stumbled over some disturbing news: apparently Louisiana has essentially declared that the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to their police forces. Warrantless search and siezure is now the rule in that state. Call me silly, but I think noise should be made over this - especially since it's the frigging judges who made the declaration and not simply a bunch of idiot state representatives. Things like this disturb me because they start to make me wonder just how far is too far in the revocation-of-rights game.
In somewhat lighter news, interesting in a more positive way, NASA is holding a debate on the idea of terraforming Mars on the thirtieth. Now, this angers me too, but only for the reason that the debate's not being hosted here in Halifax. Alas, I shall survive, somehow.
The current news coming out of the Mars rovers and probes these days is bringing this question a bit more to the forefront than before. I think the idea of going to Mars at a major level is starting to edge out of the realm of fantasy, but the question of what to do when we get there is a different matter. I'm always interested in the long-term/short-term debate that tends to run through most human affairs these days, and something so large as heading to another planet has that debate at its core to a level a lot of other stuff can't approach. To put my own views into a sound bite: yes, I'd like to see a major human presence on Mars, and yes, if it's uninhabited when we get there, I'm all for terraforming. If there's something there, then things tend to get a bit more nuanced.
Anyway, that's all for tonight. If anyone else has any commentary, feel free to fling it around. I'm especially curious what the readers' take on the second half of this is, since the first half had damn well better meet with universal outrage. ;) Perhaps #4, being the other resident space/hugeambitiousproject freak, will have his own take to offer..
A self-described psychic’s tip that a bomb might be on a plane prompted a search with bomb-sniffing dogs that turned up nothing suspicious, but forced the cancellation of the flight.
American Airlines Flight 1304 at Southwest Florida International Airport was canceled Friday because some crew members had exceeded their work hours by the time the search was finished, officials said.
The purported psychic’s call was “unusual,” conceded Doug Perkins, local administrator for the federal Transportation Security Administration director.
“But in these times, we can’t ignore anything. We want to take the appropriate measures,” he said.
But when it's compared to stuff like this:
Rice, who has refused to testify before the panel under oath and in public, met with the commission privately for four hours Feb. 7.
One issue was her May 16, 2002, statement at the White House when she said, “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center…that they would try to use ..a hijacked airplane as a missile.” Intelligence reports had detailed such plans as much as five years before 9/11.
...apparently neither Ms. Rice nor anybody on the National Intelligence staff paid much attention to thos reports. Or even, you know, picked up a goddamn Tom Clancy book.
I think we may very well be better off with Miss Cleo handling national security than Miss Condi.
Remember kids: Kerry '04.
Sorry for the quiet spell, folks; dealing with some meatspace issues as well as writing on some other projects. Alas, you get to suffer me some more, especially as my time starts freeing up again soon.
Incidentally, thanks for the reasonably civil nature of the Slashdotting last week, guys. We at the Zone expected way more trouble than we got, the discussion on James' article was terrific, and I only got one really out-there kook email about evil Spanish-Vatican conspiracies which isn't even of enough quality to bother refuting publicly. Bah, tinhatters these days aren't quite as fun as they used to be.
Anyway, we are approaching the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. Although it took most of a decade to get to this point, the culprits who masterminded the acts of 1994 are finally beginning to get what they deserve, and the country has been showing signs of healing. Even Annan is openly stating that he screwed things up as head of the DPKO back in 1994, although of course certain national governments have yet to do anything to actually acknowledge their own responsibility for the genocide.
Annan's backing a call from Kigali to attempt to pull a minute of silence in as many countries as possible on April 7, to try and "let us be united in a way we were not ten years ago." It's just pretty words and a vaguely flashy plan, of course; nobody has to actually expend much energy to shut up for sixty seconds on the decennial of the beginning of the genocide. Aside from the standard "raise awareness" good-thoughts deal, there's no real plan to do much about helping Rwanda heal, or preventing other flashpoints from becoming something as bad or worse.
On the other hand, I can't help but like the symbolism put forth. A minute of silence can potentially accomplish something; a university undergrad back in the 1930s, wondering why sovereignty was explicitly allowed to permit genocide, resulted in the entry of the word into our language and the now-standard idea that genocide is not permissable. Someone might start asking questions around this one too, and lead in time to some anti-genocide laws that actually have teeth and claws attached.
I suppose we'll see what we'll see.
In IRC, Primis brought up some interesting news about the Olympic Torch: they're having military personnel shadow the torch-bearer. This led to a short debate, Zibblsnrt considering the soldiers' presence to be a show of fear, letting the terrorists change our habits, while William sees the guards as a necessity in these times. I see validity in both arguments. As William further argued, it's a matter of degrees, but having a lot of soldiers around might be enough degrees to push me towards Zib's side.
Then it was noted the torch has been attacked before, though not by terrorists: in 2000, some idiot kid tried to put out the torch with a fire extinguisher. I promptly dubbed him the anti-Beavis.
Comments are open if anyone wants to discuss Olympics security, the quality of the Olympics' television coverage, the Olympics' popular standing versus annual sports, or anything having to do with the Olympics.
Wouldn't it piss you off if the government had your children, every day, claim that the nation stood "under no god"?
Yes, I'm going to comment on the Newdow plea. I've thunk it over a while and don't see room to debate anymore, so this is going to be a lecture.
As theocrats in the past have used government power and resources to proseletyze their religion at the state or local level, their excuse has always been that the First Amendment only applies to Congress: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". That doesn't work here. The Newdow case is all about law Congress made.
Back in the 1950s we were in a bit of a competition with the century's second worst evil dictator over which of us would rule the world. To get the people behind it, we exaggerated our differences and rubbed out our similarities, making Russia and Communism appear frighteningly alien. So along with having totalitarian maniacs draw up lists of people who asked their bosses for raises, someone noticed that the Pledge of Allegiance sounds like something that Commie kids might say in Moscow! Obvious answer: ditch the official Pledge because we're a free society founded on rebellion against authority, right?
Wrong! Noting our revolutionary foundation would allow people to point out that the Soviet Union was founded on a very similar revolution against an authoritarian monarch. Instead, we had to find a distinction and magnify it. In Stalin's Communism, you worship the State and pretend that you've done away with religion. The United States, on the other hand, had a lot of Christians, a few Jews, a bunch of people who just don't give a damn, and no one else in numbers enough to matter at the ballot box. The Pledge could be made explicitly un-Communist by establishing it as an affirmation of religious belief, by adding the words "under God". This would induct generations of schoolchildren whose parents can't afford private education into the mainstream Christian religion and the Jews won't care because it's their God too, while strict constructionalists and minorities can be brushed aside by calling them Communist traitors who want Stalin to win.
So Congress passed a law adding those words to the Pledge and President Eisenhower signed it into law, both all the while affirming that yes, this is a prayer and it is intended to establish Christianity as the official religion of the United States. Today the chief defense of the modified Pledge is that recognition of a single, nameless God is non-religious. Despite rejecting that argument as bullshit on its face, let's explain exactly why it's bullshit.
The main point of Judaism is to declare that there is one supreme God. This is seen in the Shma, Judaism's central prayer, and in the first few of the Ten Commandments. Recall that the mainstream religions at the time might be variously beholden to singular deities or pantheons, or might be belief systems involving no deity at all.
Some in the United States only consider "God" part of secular culture because our most prominent religions are Judaic and minorities are so rare that they've never had any experience with any other belief system. They aren't familiar with other religions in which there can be several Gods, a named God, a Goddess, or no God at all. These religions -- Atheism, Wicca, Shinto, Santeria, and many others -- do exist in small enclaves. Congress's declaration that we are a nation "under God" is a repudiation of their beliefs.
For fairness I must note that I am opposed to the concept of a mandated Pledge of Allegiance at all, except for government personnel, since it waives the right to revolt which is central to the nation's founding. The prayer within it is merely an additional insult. I might frighten the odd right-winger who accidentally stumbled onto this site by pointing out the Pledge's origin as a piece of honest-to-God Socialist propaganda, but that rhetoric doesn't matter to me. If we must have a pledge, let us go back to the original draft form which is far less offensive:
I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one Nation indivisible, with Equality, Liberty, and Justice for all.
Props to Scalia for actually recusing himself from this case. That was unexpected considering how he defended his independence in the Cheney case by pointing out what a great friend of Cheney's he is.
I'll let Warrior Tang and the others carry on about politics. Today I'm going to concentrate on the big wide world outside mere Earthly politics.
First up, we have the rather surprising announcement that the speed brake actuators on the shuttle Discovery were installed backwards. What's surprising about this is that this happened when Discovery was built - in 1984. That this problem wasn't discovered until twenty years later says a lot about the corporate culture at NASA, and none of it is good.
The big news today is of course the new findings about Opportunity's landing site. It seems that, yes Virginia, Mars did indeed have open water at some point in the past. How long ago, and if those oceans contained life, is still up in the air.
The Prometheus group (NASA's in-house project to design large-scale nuclear power sources for spacecraft) and the Dept. of Energy's Naval Reactor program have formally announced that joined forces. Their initial project is expected to be the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, a probe to go hunt around the Galileans. No word as of yet of a reaction from the "Nukes In Space = Evil!" crowd.
And finally, somebody managed to drag Neil Armstrong out of his hermitage to give a speech. He supported the Bush "space plan" in it, though only in passing. Which is, admittedly, more support than Bush has given it since making the initial announcement.
And that's all from me for today. Clear jets and clear skies.
Fox News brought on NSA deputy director Jim Wilkinson to rebut Clarke's allegations. Wilkinson called Clarke's book a work of fiction. Such harsh words are unexpected from the #2 of the None Such Agency, a position that must take decades of experience and bureaucratic diplomacy to earn. It's worth a google, and look what turns up: Either I misread Fox's header or Wilkinson is new to the job (we're talking months), having been an Administration spokesman last year, and he was one of Bush's lawyers during Florida (same link).
Richard Clarke and Bob Graham, two men with impeccable reputations on the subject matter, publicly blasted Bush last night for his handling of, or more accurately not handling, terrorism. What rock has the media been hiding under that they consider this debatable?
Clarke came out with some new points: Wolfowitz was into conspiracy theories blaming Iraq for al-Qaeda's terrorism (confirming what Abu Aardvark noted some months back) and belittled Osama as "that little guy", while the intelligence agencies were firm that there was no connection between Iraq and any terrorism against the United States since the attempt on Bush Sr.'s life in 1993. That's none. Nada. Even taking into consideration all the stuff they can't release to the public for national security reasons.
The Bush administration's rebuttal man was caught lying by the 60 Minutes crew when he denied that a meeting took place for which 60 Minutes had secured affirmations from two other people, including a witness. Now Bush has come out with a new rebuttal including the interesting bit that Bush was hard at work forming an anti-terrorism plan in spring and summer 2001, which is interesting because they went to Afghanistan using the anti-terrorism plan that Richard Clarke formed in late 2000.
In closing, I'll remind y'all of the Islamic Institute, Grover Norquist, the White House dinners for Sami al Arian and assorted terrorist supporters, the kissing up to Yasser Arafat, the Arbusto oil business connections, and so on, and declare that al-Qaeda could not have found a more terrorist-friendly American leader than George W. Bush.
This seems to be firing up the blogosphere: a blogger noted that Dr. John Gray, author of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, isn't a real Dr. according to another blog citing Cult News and Men's Daily News. Now he's threatened with a lawsuit.
A lot of people don't seem to understand what raw intelligence is. If someone calls up the CIA and says they have Prince Albert in a can, this becomes an unverified, "raw" intelligence report. It is neither proven nor unproven. It has to be analysed by intelligence experts according to how well the report fits into the known facts before it can be considered valid intelligence that we should build national policy around.
Here's how that would work. Let's actually use the "Prince Albert in a Can" example: First, it's sent to the guy who is been studying Prince Albert all his life and knows Prince Albert very well. Given what he knows about Prince Albert, he thinks the report is fairly unlikely, and he gets ahold of the guy who knows a lot about cans for a second opinion. They look at the report together and agree that it's not very likely. They look at the tipster's file and see a Fabrication Notice -- the tipster has previously given them information that was later proven false. They mark the report as Very Unlikely, and go on to the next one.
Now for what's been happening in this administration: the politically-appointed heads of defense and intelligence, who before their appointments were part of a lobbying group claiming that certain people had Prince Albert in a can, order their staffs to produce all intelligence reports, verified or not, about Prince Albert and about cans. The "Prince Albert in a Can" report is sent to the top, bypassing the fact-checking bureaucrats. Since the politicians are dying to find any evidence that Prince Albert really is in a can, they ignore the Very Unlikely warning and the bit about it coming from a known liar and send it to the White House. Bush goes on TV and announces, "We know they have Prince Albert in a can. This is the best intelligence possible, verified by our analysts and analysts from other countries." Colin Powell goes to the United Nations and shows them a picture of a can, and says "This is where they're keeping Prince Albert." A copy of the Prince Albert report is leaked to the government-friendly Weekly Standard which republishes it in the cover story "CASE CLOSED: They Have Prince Albert in a Can!", after which Dick Cheney tells the nation to look in the Weekly Standard report for "your best source of information on Prince Albert's whereabouts". All the while, the medium to low ranking intelligence officers in the US and allied intelligence agencies are leaking like mad to the press and unanimously insisting that we don't have any proof they have Prince Albert in a can and the intelligence isn't as good as Bush and Cheney claim it to be, and US and UN weapons inspectors report that they've looked inside the can that Powell pointed out and there's nothing there.
After a time of this, some of us in the public start to think the long-term bureaucrats are more trustworthy than the politically driven higher ranks.
What may soon become the most important news item is that Pakistani forces believe they've trapped bin Laden's #2. It's about two years overdue that something be done in the ungoverned provinces, but better late than never.
The operations seem to be Pakistani-only, although the US is probably providing intelligence and/or logistics. This is good for public relations because the Pakistani people won't see foreign soldiers on what they'll consider "our land" even though Pakistan has never really controlled these territories.
So far, I've seen no word on how well this is going over in Pakistan. There is substantial support for al-Qaeda in the military and regional governments. The last poll I heard of said support for the US was in the single digits. Given the Pakistani military's habit of leaking information about US operations against al-Qaeda to the group, chances are, the military units in these operations are some of Musharraf's most trusted, I fear this could leave the government open to a coup attempt by pro-Qaeda military units or popular riots sparked by Qaeda-run mosques.
As some background, Poland is one of the few non-Anglo republics whose government and population strongly supported both Bush and the Iraq invasion. It needn't be said that you don't say things like that on a diplomatic scale, and to have both the President and Prime Minister come out and say it on the same day, it was planned in advance.
Chances are that has a lot to do with this: Poland wants to mend ties with the European Union. Also worth noting: after the statements, Bush got on the horn with Kwasniewski and elicited a promise to keep Polish troops in Iraq.
This is a classic example of deflection, an attempt to combat criticism of their party (over Scalia) by pointing out something which is not really similar but can be described using some of the same words. It's also an example of the standard Republican tactic "accuse your opponents of being what you are". Ginsberg should recuse herself from cases where NOW is involved, but to follow the Republicans' line of thinking, we would have to recuse Rhenquist from all cases deaing with criminal matters due to his lobbying against Miranda and related restraints on police misconduct, or just go all out and recuse all the Republican justices from cases where either party or any of their lawyers is a registered Republican, and same for the Democrats.
Haiti had no standing army and a weak, dispersed police force. Instead, control was maintained by militias supporting the political parties (some call them "terrorists", too) which were not strong enough to stand against a military assault from a small force. In such a power vacuum, there is no opposition to the occupying force, and the occupying troops will even be recognized as a source of stability if they do their jobs right.
via Big, Left, Outside we have a startling report of Alan Colmes (the "liberal" half of Hannity & Colmes on Fox News) regaining his backbone...
Colmes, politely, thanking him for his service to his country, asked him a series of pointed questions in which it became clear to all viewers that the poor guy really didn't have any complaint against Kerry, except for "looking for ways around problems," and Hannity looked like, in the aftermath, he had just been prison raped. You could see the entire meme collapsing in its launching moment: the guy all the right-wingers had been waiting for, the silent crewmate, had nothing really bad to say about Kerry.
Hopefully it'll last...
The junior college I attend recently had a showing of "Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War". To the school's credit, the presenter (someone from the philosophy department) noted that the title was a lie; nobody knows the Whole Truth and you're not likely to get it from a 60 minute film.
I was afraid that this was going to be histrionic far-left propaganda from one of those anti-war organizations tied to Stalinist and Maoist groups. To my pleasant surprise, it was merely moderate-left propaganda and actually worth watching. The documentary was produced and directed by Robert Greenwald (who recently directed and helped produce a biography of Abbie Hoffman) with funding provided by Democratic Party loyalist group MoveOn.org and the left-leaning Center for American Progress founded by Leon Podesta, Bill Clinton's chief of staff. An interview with Greenwald provides additional background.
It starts off by appealing for legitimacy by showcasing "The Experts", the two dozen or so people interviewed to make the film. Notable inclusions are Nixon's lawyer John Dean, Bush's former Army Secretary Thomas E. White, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Blair's cabinet member Clare Short who resigned in disgust at the war, and former arms inspector Scott Ritter. The film flips back and forth between public statements from the Bush Administration and the inverviewees refuting them. It might seem like one of those roundtable evening talk shows, but it's not -- the Administration is not presented the opportunity to rebut the rebuttals.
This isn't a film that will convince anybody who already supports Bush. The right wing is going to ignore the film's arguments for the mere presence of Ritter, Wilson, Short, and Nation editor David Corn. Ritter has discredited himself by claiming Iraq didn't have nonconventional weapons at a time few believed this -- in other words, by being right -- and by associating himself with the aforemaligned fringe groups. Wilson is considered "discredited" because he had the audacity to call Bush a liar for lying about information that Wilson, working as Dick Cheney's operative, had reported to the White House. Short is seen by many as a traitor for not standing by Blair as he, in her eyes, acted to flush the country down the toilet. Corn authored the book "The Lies of George W. Bush" and is known for partisan ranting in his colunns.
Another reason to dismiss the film's content for its mere appearance is the background of some of the Wilson interview scenes, where he is positioned in front of a poster showing a judge's gavel smashing a flag-painted map of the United States, striking in Florida. This overt reference to the Supreme Court's decision in the 2000 elections, besides being the main reason I'm calling this a propaganda film, can be used to accuse Wilson of having an anti-Bush agenda dating back to 2000 which could have influenced his report on Niger uranium. Other notable backgrounds were that Dean was placed in front of a banner showing various monetary symbols (dollar, yen, pound, etc) and was later placed in front of a People Magazine whose headline began "DEA- RAD-", the later letters obscured by his head.
Beyond these trivialities of appearance, there is serious information in the film: direct statements by people in a position to know which contradict direct statements by the Bush administration. The film shows Bush, Rumsfeld, et al saying things that the mainstream media now insists they never said: that Iraq had al-Qaeda ties and was trying to build nukes, that Iraq had hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons and we knew where they were, and so on. By going back to these public statements, the show blows away a year of spin muffling the current debate on the war.
The most important new information in the film (new to me, anyway) is the thorough debunking of Colin Powell's famous presentation before the United Nations. Powell claimed there was an alliance between Ansar al Islam and Iraq, and most of the current claims that Abu Zarqawi was connected to Iraq stem back to Powell's presentation; while many of the individual claims about Zarqawi were not refuted, the film cited Ansar's leader saying of Iraq that "they are our enemy" for being "outside of Islam's zone". Powell claimed that Iraq had lots of anthrax left over from before the 1991 war, and held up a tiny tube of white powder as an example of how deadly the stuff would be; Ritter noted that Iraq's anthrax had a shelf life of three years and was so unrefined that it looked more like Coca-Cola than white powder. Powell claimed trucks photographed at a site were decontamination vehicles; Ritter identified them as Iraqi fire trucks. It was pointed out that the reason Powell only had artists' conceptions of mobile laboratories was because there was no proof they actually existed and to this day nobody has found one. Powell claimed there were chemical weapons in facilities which Ritter's team had been through numerous times and never found anything in. Powell showed off footage of a Mirage jet modified to spray chemical weaponry; the prototype had been destroyed in 1991. Powell claimed Iraq's posession of 100-500 tons of chemical weapons to be a "conservative estimate", which McGovern notes would fill 16,000 warheads that have yet to be found.
For all the Experts they used, they only came away with an hour's worth of film, making me wonder what ended up on the cutting room floor. It looked like a lot of people only had one or two lines end up in the final film. It must also be noted that the individuals' claims are their own, and the other experts are not necessarily backing each other up on their statments. I don't know if the people interviewed ever rebutted each others' rebuttals, or if the lesser-used Experts saw and approved the final version of the show.
Also, the movie's heavy reliance on Ritter, Wilson, and Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity co-founder Ray McGovern exposes a weakness in the movie's methods: since there is generally only one rebuttal shown for each Administration charge, finding any of these major Experts' information to be unreliable would shoot a big hole in the movie's attempt at being a documentary.
The movie's webpage has a transcript. If you don't think you'll ever see the film, it's worth reading at least once and filing in the back of your head for future reference. In sum, I could say the same thing about the film. It's not great or conclusive, but it's a fair attempt and it's worth knowing the information presented in it.
A couple of days ago, over at Collective Sigh, Andante wrote about the Madrid bombings and their effect on the election in Spain:
Perhaps the message of the Spanish election is not a win for al Queda or a repudiation of the right-center policies, but a rejection of politicians who don the triumphalist armor, and attempt to manipulate events in their own favor.The voters certainly did not embrace al Queda or cave to it's demands - they rejected Aznar's alliance with George Bush and the war in Iraq and Aznar's apparently politically motivated attempts to pin the blame for the latest terrorist attack on ETA.
I think that Andante's take on the affair is definately worth noting. Events in the world these days, particularly when you start flinging the T-word around, become a lot more complex and nuanced than people would believe. The extremes on both sides tend to condense things down to quick sound bites. The right claims that terrorists are attacking us because they hate us for our freedoms; the left makes conspirational claims tying events like this to American special operations.
Both of these claims are, of course, idiotic, and examples of One True Cause-ism, which is a popular pastime among those who would prefer to spend time not thinking.
So are these bombings a victory for al-Qaeda, or ETA, whichever is responsible? Are they a victory for anyone at all? I have my ideas, but they're a bit unconventional.
There's a theory based out of Latin American terrorism ideologies of the sixties and seventies, and most recently (to me) noted in the Canadian press in a blistering rebuttal to Edward Luttwak (a brilliant military historian if a lousy political scientist), which implies that terrorist organizations want these militant governments, these Bushes and Aznars and Sharons, in office. The rationale is not to drive them out of one's home - in this case, Iraq and the Middle East in general - although that would be a pleasant upside.
Osama and his buddies are far from stupid, and no doubt know that they can't drive a hyperpower out of anyplace with a relatively small guerilla band. So what do you do? You provoke - both sides. The major terrorist attacks since 1998, cumulating in the September 2001 attacks, have infuriated the United States, which of course could not simply bolt from the Middle East over them. The result was in fact a tighter clampdown on affairs, the climax of which was not one but two wars which have not only created tremendous outrage in the Muslim and Arab world, but also at home in Europe and in the streets of the United States itself.
The result of this is that the United States - which, in my opinion, was at least partly justified in some of its actions under Bush's maladministration, although I'm hard-pressed to think of anything past the casus belli for the Afghan war - is finding itself spread thinner across the ground, with a shrinking pool of relevant allies (check the mighty members of the Coalition of the Willing sometime) and one of the more polarized political societies at home in years or decades. On top of all this, the territories occupied by Coalition troops, and those states bordering on them, are growing increasingly tense and violent.
Additional provocation - say, a major attack in Britain, or Canada, or again in the United States - would certainly earn an even more forceful response from the West. But what would the impact of this be? The new-and-yet-old theory on this sort of thing implies that provoking the target to greater acts of force is a good thing...
...because the West is, in return, provoking the very same people it is claiming to be liberating.
So we're stuck in a feedback loop here, in which there are two feasible options: one, military domination over most or all of the Muslim world (which is only marginally feasible), or (more likely) largescale multinational efforts against American foreign policy, driven by an Arab street which had finally had enough. Once things are pushed far enough, al-Qaeda will not be wanting for recruits, even doomed ones in the war that would imply.
However, to keep this sort of thing up, the power base of the enemy needs to be kept strong as well. You have to keep your own guys belittled, angry and oppressed, because you need that tension building up. Defeats for the Coalition or the West in general - say, a massive bombing spree in Madrid which brings down a major government and forces its withdrawal from Iraq, inspiring other countries like Italy to consider the same - would certainly come across as a significant victory for the pro-independence crowd.
Many of the extremists in the world - both those firing on Coalition vehicles and the more out-there antiwar protestors in the west - will see this as a defeat for the Coalition, therefore a victory for themselves. There will be joy and celebration, and that precious tension will be reduced. The Coalition will stay there, but its opponents will be merely optimistic, not necessarily driven by infuriated desperation.
And that, my friends, is a defeat for al-Qaeda. With the loss of Spanish support for the war, the ability of these more long-term terrorist plans to provoke their own people by proxy are being reduced. The best thing Osama and his fellows could hope for would be an even more nationalist Spanish government, riding upon the Martyrs of Madrid, stepping up the intensity of their actions in Iraq as the other Coalition nations goad their newly-blooded partner on.
This is, of course, also a defeat for the United States, who has lost their sixth-largest Coalition partner and is now spread a bit thinner on the ground, to say nothing of dealing with the diplomatic and domestic turmoil set off by the bombings and the election they helped shift.
So perhaps everyone lost out in this affair. Most certainly the unfortunate people in Madrid, many of whom will be recovering from their wounds for some time to come, did. But I believe that this attack backfired in most concievable ways. While it hurt American policy, it also hurt the long-term goals which are part and parcel of some of the deeply-rooted and surprisingly sophisticated ideologies of terrorist organizations aroudn the world.
Fortunately, I want both parties in this fight to be blunted. I need neither an American empire more explicit than this one is, nor a Huntingtonian Kulturkrieg hurled up between Islam and the West. My own wants for the future are a bit difficult to put into words, as - like most peoples' wishes - they're a bit more complex than sound-byte material.
Either way, the stalemate just got that much deeper, and anyone declaring victory out of this mess needs to look a bit further than their own noses.
On March 2nd, I was a poll worker for this year's California primary election. More specifically, I was a Systems Inspector in San Diego county, whose problems with voting machines and procedures received some coverage in the national media.
First, a summary of my personal opinion: I think that current electronic voting systems are better than the traditional systems in terms of security, and also in terms of usability for most people. However, I share the opinion of many bloggers that major security issues remain in the new machines and implementations, and that these issues should already have been fixed.
More details below...
This was San Diego's first election using electronic voting machines - specifically, Diebold AccuVote-TSx stations. Previous elections in the county used punch cards. The county failed to make the mandated upgrade prior to the last election, and a federal court ordered that it be done for this primary.
Previously, precinct boards in the county were made up of an Inspector, an Assistant Inspector, and clerks. As of this election, a Systems Inspector and an Assistant Systems Inspector have been added at each precinct. According to the Registrar of Voters, this is because a four-hour training session would have been required in order for Inspectors to learn both the general procedures and how to operate the machines. Instead, most of the technical details are left to the Systems Inspectors.
I was contacted and assigned as a Standby Systems Inspector, meaning that if necessary, I would stand in for a missing Systems Inspector or Assistant Systems Inspector in my part of the county. The standby system is apparently not used very much; they forgot to handle some details, like sending me a copy of the poll worker's manual, or notifying me that the location for the mandatory training had changed. Fortunately, I'm fairly resourceful, and the classes were running late anyway.
In the class, we were introduced to how the system works. Along with the usual paperwork and supplies, each precinct has:
* A Precinct Control Model (PCM).
* A number of voting stations (either four, six, or eight).
* Two Voter Access Cards (VACs) per station, plus one or two extras.
* Two Supervisor Cards.
A poll worker (usually the Systems Inspector) sits in front of the PCM. One poll worker has each voter sign the roster, while another checks the voter's address on another list. That second worker points to the appropriate line on the address list, and the PCM operator sees which party to program a ballot for - with the party name never said aloud.
The PCM operator then selects the party on the PCM's touchscreen, and inserts any one of the Voter Access Cards (VACs) for programming. The VAC is then given to the voter, who inserts the VAC into any one of the stations, and is then presented with the ballot for their party. After casting their ballot, the voter's VAC is ejected, and the voter is instructed to give it back to the poll staff. The VAC itself is not a ballot at all - it just authorizes a voting station to bring one up, and tells it which party's ballot to display. After a ballot has been cast using a VAC, it must be reprogrammed on the PCM prior to being used again.
We were warned that some voters might try to cheat by claiming that they received the wrong party's ballot. We were advised that, should this happen, we should insert the card in a station to make sure that it had not been used to cast a ballot already; then, add one to the tally sheet of programmed but uncast ballots, and reprogram the VAC after checking the voter's registered party on the street address list.
That was about it. We were shown the startup and shutdown procedures for the machines, and cast a few sample ballots with them. The regular poll workers were noted on a list, and some paperwork or other was handled. I asked about getting ahold of a poll worker's manual, and was promptly given one from a large box that was sitting on the curb. It contains operating passwords for the machines, and voice certification codes, all laser-printed and mass-produced in binders.
The passwords were obviously not chosen for security. Nevertheless, I've blacked them out in the complete copy of the manual that I have posted for your downloading enjoyment. NFZ's research suggests that it's legal for us to do this. If you don't already have it, grab a BitTorrent client (such as the official one), and then start downloading! The archive is 11 MB. After downloading, please leave your BitTorrent window open for as long as possible. BitTorrent works by having every user both download and upload, taking most of the strain off of our server. If more users continue uploading, things will be faster for everyone, and we won't have to pay as much to host the file.
So, how did the election itself go? Avi Rubin mentioned that his fellow poll workers were dedicated to making things work right, and I can say the same thing. Few people without a strong sense of civic duty would work a fourteen-hour day for $60 or $100. We all did a good job, with only minor exceptions. Of course, those exceptions are what I'll be concentrating on here. Almost all of the voters were very understanding, and loved the new machines after they voted. We only had two people who went out of their way to be difficult, although a few more did voice concerns about paper receipts.
At 6:00 AM on March 2nd, I was dispatched to a precinct two suburbs south of here, where their Systems Inspector was unavailable due to a case of the flu. Solana Beach is a small and affluent suburb, although it was originally a grungy surfer colony. I don't know if it has anything to do with the fictional community of the same name in Tentacles. The precinct I worked at was one of the more affluent: the poll was held in a resident's garage on a ridge perhaps half a mile inland, with an excellent view of the Pacific.
My arrival was practically Messianic. It was ten minutes prior to opening time, the PCM was having trouble, and one of the stations wasn't working. Fixing the station was a fairly simple matter - the stations are connected in a daisy-chain configuration, and one had been plugged into itself rather than its neighbor. The PCM was simply very confused, and kept giving us dialog boxes with various runtime errors. Power-cycling the PCM made it work for about 25 ballots, but it then reported more runtime errors related to the smart card reader. I was worried that data might be lost, but the Inspector went ahead and restarted the PCM once again. It worked for the rest of the day, with no apparent data loss.
I found out later that a cable allows the PCM to be plugged into line power while in its sealed case, and that there had been an extended power outage the day before in many areas. This is apparently what caused PCMs in several places to show a Windows CE desktop instead of the voting software. I heard from one source (which I forget, unfortunately) that this was because part of the boot loader was stored in volatile memory. I have no idea if our problems were related to power.
We plugged in the station and fixed the PCM, then opened the polls about five minutes late. Fortunately, we didn't come close to turning anyone away; a number of precincts in the county apparently opened an hour or more late. As instructed, we asked the first voter to inspect the "zero report" from each machine before closing the printer doors for the rest of the day.
About half an hour into the poll, one voter had apparently gotten halfway through her ballot before the station began going to the previous page. I had her go forward to the last page on which she had been able to vote, and we both stepped back and watched the machine page backwards to the instructions. I'm guessing that this was a broken touchscreen. It worked well enough for me to cancel the ballot and move her to a different station; I closed the broken station for the rest of the day, and our Inspector called the troubleshooter hotline. There were supposedly one hundred Diebold employees and some county troubleshooters covering about 1,200 precincts, which seems generous to me, but they didn't dispatch anyone. Our problems were apparently minor compared to those at many of the other precincts.
Most of the day was fairly routine. We tended to have patches of heavy traffic, lasting for maybe twenty minutes, and then quiet periods before the next rush. The busiest time was around 5 PM, when we had six people voting and another six in line - still not too much for us to handle. We did have some problems figuring out what to do about absentees and exceptions. San Diego lets you vote in a precinct other than your own using a "provisional ballot," which is also used in some other situations. With a provisional ballot, your vote is tied to your ID. After Election Day, the Registrar of Voters reviews the provisional ballots to make sure that each voter is, in fact, entitled to vote; their vote is then counted. The system makes things complicated for everyone, and I'm not sure whether we actually did a few of the provisional ballots properly. (For more details on provisional ballots, take a look at the poll worker's manual.)
Another procedural problem, which I understand was the case in a number of precincts, was that many voters' parties did get said aloud. This was especially problematic for voters who were registered as Non-Partisan, and were allowed to pick which party's primary they wished to vote in. Explaining how this worked usually took several minutes per voter. One voter was quite upset after voting; he had chosen a Non-Partisan Non-Partisan ballot, but had wanted to vote in the Democratic primary. After that happened, we told Non-Partisan voters to ask for help before casting their ballot if they didn't see the expected options.
We had another technical problem later in the day, when a voter reported that his summary screen (the last step before casting the ballot) was blank. I confirmed that it was; everything else seemed normal, and the boxes were checked next to each candidate on the ballot, but there wasn't anything on the screen where the votes should have been listed. I moved the voter to another station, chalking it up to a card programming error, and kept checking on that station. Another voter had the same problem shortly afterwards, and I closed the station. It appeared to have recorded all of the votes properly, but I can't be 100% certain. If it hadn't recorded some data, there wouldn't have been anything that we could do. Again, the troubleshooter hotline didn't send anyone out; we only had a few more hours to go, and still had four machines working.
Closing went fairly smoothly. I noticed that the ballot memory cards are, in fact, standard SanDisk 128MB PCMCIA flash cards; Avery labels on them identify the precinct and machine number. As Avi Rubin mentioned, the memory cards were behind locked doors, although the keys were fairly simple and identical county-wide. (We didn't check on slow voters as much as in his precinct, but I did develop a Pavlovian response to the sound of a VAC ejecting.) Another poll worker accidentally ejected one of the cards before powering off the machine, and contrary to my expectations, no warnings appeared. As other poll workers have undoubtedly complained before, there are far too many materials that have to go in far too many different pouches.
We drove to the local collection center in order to drop off the ballots and equipment, and upon arrival, the Inspector was very unhappy. Normally, a staff of five or six quickly unloads everything, and a uniformed Sheriff's deputy signs for it. Instead, we waited in a long line. There was one person loading machines into a rented truck, an authoritative-sounding guy in a hat who turned out to be the deputy, and two volunteers helping the precinct officers unload their own cars.
As the Inspector was driving me home, she asked: "So...how many ways did you think of...?"
"Quite a few."
Okay, this has got me pissed off.
For those of you who haven't caught the cries of outrage which, fortunately, seems to be rising up about that, the link in question is about H.R. 3920, introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives a couple of days ago. The purpose of the bill is to allow the United States Congress to reverse Supreme Court decisions. Gee, I wonder which court ruling set this off.
It's being spun as a judicial accountability act; the standard trash about Unelected Judges Writing Our Laws For Us, which translates as "Waah, I want to write unconstitutional law and get away with it." This is a case of Congressional leaders - you can find yours here - acting in a childish manner even for them, to the point of refusing to recognize rulings of the independent Supreme Court simply because they adhere to the law and not popular bigotry.
So what are they suggesting? Mr. Lewis(KY) Mr. DeMint, Mr. Everett, Mr. Pombo, Mr. Coble, Mr. Collins, Mr. Goode, Mr. Pitts, Mr. Franks (AZ), Mr. Hefley, Mr. Doolittle, and Mr. Kingston are suggesting the abolition of the judicial branch of the United States government.
Oh, I'm certain they're putting it in terms of judicial accountability, protecting our nation from itself, or whatever else. But with this law in effect, just what the hell purpose does the Supreme Court, or the judges whose rulings feed into it, serve? The entire point of an independent judiciary is that they are able to issue rulings which, although controversial, can be legally correct and suffer no repurcussions. The above House representatives wish to eliminate this status, reducing the judicial branch to a subsidiary of Congress and thereby giving Congress the power to both create and interpret the legality of the bills it passes into law.
The effect of this bill will be to declare all acts constitutional, provided that Congress passes them. Everything from mundane tax laws to the Reinstitute Segregation And Kill All The Muslims Act of 2005 will be immune to judicial interference, because Congress can, with this law, jam their fingers in their ears and say "I can't hear you" while using the Constitution as toilet paper.
If you live in the United States you will, of course, be writing your representatives in House and Senate about this, in addition to whoever else you know. You will do so on paper or by telephone, as emailing is unreliable enough to be a waste of time, and putting a bit of effort into your notice won't kill you anyway. You'll also do this right now, because this is probably the one piece of law proposed during the Bush Administration which most desperately needs opposing.
Draft? As unappetizing as it is, there's nothing technically wrong with it. USA PATRIOT Act or the Patriot II bill ridered into tax laws? They're flagrantly unconstitutional at the very least, but there was at least the provision for a Supreme Court to overturn the acts.
H.R. 3920 will eliminate even that avenue of safety. I'd like you to all take a minute to think about what would happen to legislation in the United States once judicial review is eliminated. After that minute has passed, I want you to start writing your reps and passing the word on this to anyone else you know of.
There are twelve members of Congress whose political careers desperately need to end with the conclusion of their terms. I want a large enough shitstorm set into motion to purge these traitors from the American polity, taking the fragments of their totalitarian ideals with them.
Get to it, guys. Don't think you can wait until next time.
![[map]](http://www.nukefreezone.net/archives/iran-map-040315.png)
Well, it's been a day, and the rioters haven't given up according to the only source for this story. Problems in Iran go much deeper than the one politician, and this might be turning into a small scale rebellion.
Anti-government demonstrations have now (reportedly) spread from the source, Fereydoon-Kenar, to the neighbouring towns of Babol and Babol-Sar. According to the report, police still have control of those towns and are heightening security in what look like the major tranportation hubs near the affected area.
You know, there's a lot to rag on the Bush Administration for, and we at the Nuke Free Zone do that whenever we feel like it.
But this is beyond the pale:
Administration sources tell TIME that employees at the Department of Homeland Security have been asked to keep their eyes open for opportunities to pose the President in settings that might highlight the Administration's efforts to make the nation safer. The goal, they are being told, is to provide Bush with one homeland-security photo-op a month.
Tell your friends, tell your enemies. Make sure that everybody knows that GEORGE W. BUSH IS DIVERTING NATIONAL SECURITY FOR PHOTO-OP PURPOSES. Don't let this go unchallenged.
Seen in the kuro5hin.org diary section: there are riots going on in Iran. It's a quite obviously biased report, and the only other mention currently on Google News is a day old, so facts are scarce.
Some background: Iran is going through elections which are as fraudulent as you can get, as the dictatorial Guardian Council (like the US Supreme Court but with the power to create, not just interpret, law) has disqualified thousands of politicians for being too liberal. From the above reports, it looks like Iran's judiciary cancelled election returns from three left-leaning towns, which happens to have been enough to give a Parliament seat to a conservative candidate. Protests were held which led to violence which led to riots, and the rioters sacked a police station.
Zibblsnrt and I have been wondering when a civil war would break out over the disqualifications. This instead looks to be a localized insurrection that might be put down by the end of the night, unless they can spread it by encouraging malcontents in other towns. Another report which Zib dug up says that the conservative politician stepped down, which might pacify the crowd. If the riots have already been going on for two days without spreading, they might not last much longer, but strange things have been happening in the world lately. We'll probably have seen what direction this takes by this time tomorrow.
Keeping you informed and interested, here's today's MLP:
John Kerry keeps pestering Bush for a series of monthly debates between the two. Bush so far has refused and is likely to continue to do so in the future. Why? Well...
"When I first decided to do it, I wondered if voters could actually withstand and endure the cruel and unusual punishment of having to listen to two politicians for that long," Mr. Kerry said. But, he added, people watched the encounters on television, and "by the time voters went to the polls, everyone knew where we stood and what we would do."
You can see how something like that would derail the Bush campaign utterly.
DARPA's contest to build a robot capable of traveling 150 miles across the Mojave Desert has ended prematurely. None of the contestants had managed to get more than 7 miles away from the starting line before breaking down. Better luck next time, guys.
From Betterhumans and professional cyborg Kevin Warwick, we have a rundown on the types of neural interface implants currently being worked on in the labs.
Researchers at Cambridge say that they've managed to come up with a technique to create nanotube fibers of indefinate length. The study needs to be duplicated and actually tested as an industrial process, but we are now getting even closer to the concept of the space elevator becoming a reality.
Air America is set to go live on the 31st. The new all-liberal radio network will premiere in four cities in the US (including within pickup range of the Nuke Free Zone) and expand from there. The shows to watch will be Al Franken's O'Franken Hour and RFK Jr's weekend program. The programming will be available over the internet, so everybody in the NFZ blogzone (including mountain boys like me and Haligonians like Zibblsnrt) will be able to listen in.
I'd
like to take this opportunity to plug once again the plight of the Hubble
Space Telescope. Since NASA Chief Administrator Sean O'Keefe is too busy
being a craven jackass, sucking up to the Bush administration in order to make
himself look good, we're going to have to play politics against him.
The BBC is reporting that Hubble might get a reprieve via a telepresence service operation:
The Hubble Space Telescope may have won a reprieve as Nasa has agreed to study ways to service it using robots.
In January, it said there would be no more risky astronaut visits to re-supply the telescope thereby limiting its life to only a few more years.
Responding to pressure from politicians and astronomers, Nasa has now agreed to have the National Academy of Sciences look at other upgrading possibilities.
Nasa says no promises are being made and the study may not alter its views.
We're not out of the woods yet, but we've moved a distance away from the unilateral closed-door decision made by O'Keefe. If you haven't already signed the Save Hubble petition (linked from the image) and you care about space science, I humbly suggest you go do so as quickly as you can. I don't get that passionate about many causes, so when I spend this much time on advocacy you can be sure that I think it really matters.
Every little bit helps.
Welp, it's finally out of the bag.
Over the past week the provisional government in Iraq actually seems to have settled down long enough to figure out what their constitution would be. I've had some trouble finding the thing - there was a definate lag between the announcment and its showing up - but I've finally gotten a hold of a copy, and so I decided it needs to be examined much like I went over the constitution of Afghanistan in January.
As much as it bugs me, I'm using the copy of the constitution available at the Coalition Provisional Authority's webpage. What specifically is annoying me is the flagwaving and obviously American nature of the site - just check the bottom to have links to organizations like the USA Freedom Corps of all the godforsaken things, not to mention four other links which generally give the idea that the CPA is less a provisional, transitional government than it is an arm of the American polity. Now, this is true, but it's a little bothersome that they'd be quite so upfront about showing so.
The text itself has some issues as well, but those are as much linguistic as ideological. Although the CPA seems to only be showing the English version, there's obviously going to be an Arabic version kicking around somewhere. The problems are twofold: one, I don't read Arabic; two, the translation in this thing is absolutely horrific in places, which is causing not a few ambiguities for my own reading of it. I'll try to point out some of the best (worst?) instances of this.
On to the constitution itself. This goes on for awhile, so unless you're one of those nuts who enjoys studying this sort of thing, just skip to the end where I give my overall impressions.
Right off, in the preamble, they couldn't help but snipe at Saddam. Not that I'm surprised, but..
Okay, anyway. The first chapter of the constitution (which refers to itself as the Law of Administration for the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period, "the Law" for short) is a nine-article list of fundamental principles. For the most part this is a basic rundown of things you'll see in a typical liberal-democratic constitution - general mission statement-type things describing the nature of the state ("republican, federal, democratic, pluralistic"), a few clauses laying out the dates for the transition period, and spending some more ink and electrons sniping in Article 6, which basically says "we'll try not to be Saddam Hussein Redux."
The main place it differs is in its placing Islam within the system. Article 7(A) declares Islam the official religion of Iraq and considers it "a source of legislation," with a declaration vaguely similar to Afghanistan's that no other law can contradict the "universally agreed tenets of Islam" - and of course that won't be a source of dispute - while also specifying that the (undefined) "principles of democracy" not be harmed either. This whole article is kind of odd, trying to simultaneously specify Iraq as a religious and a secular country in a way that almost manages to contradict itself. Someone who can juggle the country and keep this article unbroken definately gets my respect.
7(B) is our first "WTF?" clause: "Iraq is a country of many nationalities, and the Arab people in Iraq are an inseperable part of the Arab nation." Zuh? That could mean way too many things to quantify, although it sounds at least partly like a combination of traditional pan-Arabist sentiment and a stab at the Kurdish population. Anyone stumbling over this article who can read Arabic might be able to give us a hand here.
Finally for this section, Article 9 specifically and in detail lays out Arabic and Kurdish as the country's main language. Nothing really complex here, aside from the longstanding social issues, which I'm not qualified to write on anyway. On we go...
Chapter Two of the constitution is the Iraqi people's new fundamental rights. Right off we step into another mission-statement clause (Article 10) and then get into the next article, which is an impressively broad definition of citizenship which not only defines the concept, but grants it back onto anyone who has had their citizenship revoked through one decree or another since 1980.
The next two articles include your standard broad quality clause - "without regard to gender, sect, opinion or belief, nationality..." you know the type. There's nothing in Article 12 that wouldn't or shouldn't be in most western constitutions, and there's certainly nothing the CPA wouldn't allow in it. Article 13 lays this out in more detail, specifying in what ways folks are equal in terms of property, opinion, right to protest and strike, and so on. 13(G), which specifically prohibits slavery, kinda jumped out at me, if just for the starkness of its sitting in the middle of the other clauses. Article 14 more or less continues on this tangent, specifying that individuals have a right to secutity, education, health care and social security.
Article 15(A) - second WTF clause! "No civil law shall have retroactive effect unless the law [not the Law, i.e. the constitution] so stipulates." This strikes me as something like Canada's notwithstanding clause, only without the use of the word "reasonable." Either it's a translation error, or 15(A) just kind of repeals itself by existing. The rest of the article is legal rights - arrest, trial, aftermath of innocent or guilty verdicts, and so on. Any American or Canadian citizen should at least know all these rights, and you'll certainly recognize them all. Additional ones to what we know of are 15(I) and 15(J), which prohibit military tribunals for civilians and torture "in all its [undefined!] forms," respectively.
The next article includes a kind of common-defense clause in much the same sense as the Afghan constitution's by saying that "Public property is sacrosanct, and its protection is the duty of every citizen" (emphasis added). I'm starting to wonder if this kind of clause is common in the region's constitutions and legal traditions, and I'm probably going to go take a look and find out after I write this. The article which follows is kind of a pseudo-Second Amendment; it prohibits gun purchases unless they're licensed "in accordance with the Law." Fine by me, although the single-issueers in North America are probably already having strokes.
The next six clauses continue running down additional rights - no taxation without representation (Art. 18), protection of refugees currently in Iraq(!) (19), universal franchise (20), protection of civil society (21), a venue to petition for redress of grievances (22) and finally a "these aren't the only rights" clause (23), which says the Iraqis enjoy "all the rights that befnt a free people possessed of their human dignity, including the rights stipulated in international treaties and agreements" and so on. I could say really snarky things about recognition of Article 23 rights in other countries, but that's far too easy.
The Law's next chapter describes the basic organization of the federal government of the new Iraq. It begins by laying out the three main branches - a bicameral legislature, the cabinet and prime minister, and the judiciary. Here we see a seperation-of-powers principle saying the three branches are seperate and independent as in the American system. Myself, I come from a fusion-of-powers system, and am quite content with the way it operates, but I can see how it is also open to abuse. At the same time, a sufficiently adversarial seperation-of-powers system is going to have a devil of a time getting things done. Iraq's a bad enough quagmire militarily and socially without adding a political quagmire on top of it, but I don't know what else can be done there short of particularly draconian impositions of government structure.
An interesting clause in this section is Article 28(C), which blocks military personnel from taking part in politics by either running for office or campaigning for an individual. They can still vote. The clause seems a bit vague; I find myself wondering whether civilians employed by the military - to say nothing of reservists - would be blocked out of politics in a similar matter. An additional limit applies to members of the rest of the government - no judges, elected representatives, or cabinet ministers can serve in "any other position in or out of government."
The next three chapters summarize the legislative, executive and judicial branches of the government over seventeen articles. Articles 31 and 36 lay out requirements to serve in the legislature and cabinet; both essentially say "don't be a jerk" and make some rather pointed limitations, down to forbidding participants in specific, named military campaigns from running for public office. The legislative branch is explicitly required to have at least sixty-nine female members; I like the touch at egalitarianism, which is needed, but at the same time quotas tend to breed discontent..
Overall, the move is towards a parliamentary system, with all the standard trappings of such in terms of procedure, voting formulas, and so on. The structure is not quite unitary; the legislative house is counterbalanced by the cabinet and a "presidency council" of three members - the president and two deputies - who manage higher foreign-affairs functions. There are some nonstandard changes here, however. In parliamentary systems which have both a president and a prime minister - as Iraq does - the president is usually in charge of the army, considering his involvement with foreign affairs and general representation of the state. The prime minister manages the internal affairs and the government. In Iraq's case, however, the president has no command authority over the armed forces, who answer to the prime minister via the minister of defense. Additionally, the president's two deputies - this was a stumbling block, as the initial proposal was for one - seems to have a bit of the anti-coup mentality you see in the Afghan executive branch's example.
On the other hand, the constitution for Iraq definately overcompensates; the prime minister wields enormous power in this system if he can maintain party discipline. The fear of too strong an executive has created a very powerful legislative branch here, which I predict will cause at least some controversy over the next few months - and will ruffle foreign feathers with entertaining regularity. The rest of the organization of these two branches is fairly conventional, and anyone with a passing familiarity with parliamentary government will recognize most of the system.
The judiciary is declared right off to be independent of the entire government, "including the Ministry of Justice," which should be interesting. There's a few things in this branch that I like. The first is that the judges are appointed for life. I despise elected judiciaries and find them extremely dangerous; life or at least long-term appointments allow for a sorely-needed independence. Additionally, Iraq's legislative branch will be really powerful under this system, and having a strong judiciary - which is largely in the executive's hands - strikes me as a good way to strike a balance in a still-unstable system. The government is also required to keep a pool of 18-27 candidates to replace Supreme Court justices as they die or resign, which I think is a neat touch and an extra layer of buffering/warning against judicial stacking. A number of explicit references to Kurdish regions remaining independent of the federal judiciary could prove a mixed blessing. I wonder what the Turks think of this...
The next, and third-to-last, chapter covers special tribunals and national commissions, which is mostly a brief summary of reform and transitional groups for matters such as property claims, human rights issues, de-Ba'athification, and so on. These four articles are brief, fairly un-Byzantine compared to the rest of this elephantine piece of work, and straightforward.
The next chapter covers the regional governments in Iraq, and gets incredibly hairy in places. Although much of the chapter is devoted to the minutiae of internal organization, Article 53 talks about the Kurdistan Regional Government and establishes provisions for provinces (governates) to set up additional "regions" of three or more governates. The provision is there for any three governates, but the explicit mention of the Kurds strikes me as a mixed bag. For one thing, it was promised (scroll down through the list of affirms, notes, etc; it's near the bottom of that list) rather explicitly that Iraq's territorial integrity would be respected, and here they are providing a constitutional grant of autonomy - not independence, but definately autonomy - to the largest secessionist group in the country.
I have no particular opinions about the Kurds' cause either way - I don't know enough about it to comment - but I do know that Article 53 provides potential risks to regional stability, especially if someone decides to take a shot at finalizing what was begun in the 1980s and breaking away from Baghdad altogether. Considering the existing instability of the region - plus the fact that Turkey's glaring at both Iraqi and Turkish Kurds over the Kurdistan idea in the first place - this is simply adding fault lines, and I think it was inappropriate to stick it in at a constitutional level before the fighting has worn down in the capital's streets.
The final chapter is simply some more notes on the transitional period, mainly pertaining to deadlines for drafting (15 August 2005) and approving (15 October) the constitution so a government can be elected (15 December) to implement (31 December) the text before the turn of 2006.
...So. What do I think of this overall?
I'm kind of mixed on it. I was a lot more enthusiastic about Afghanistan's constitution for a number of reasons. First, it was far more popularly concieved than the Iraqi example. Both constitutions were written in the vacuum of a government deposed by foreign militaries, but I had more faith in the Afghan example just for the method in which it was drafted. It was a relatively small group, but the whole process was considerably more open, and there wasn't a foreign administration explicitly saying they were going to control what did and did not make it in.
The Iraqi constitution is also pretty slapdash in places. You can spot where the constitution's writers were afraid of repeats, especially in the power of the presidency, and they overcompensate - at times grossly - by shunting power around in a way which concentrates it in the hands of the prime minister in way that almost, but not quite, makes Canadian prime ministers envious. The overall structure of the government in terms of the legal/religious conflict, and the clauses which could be interpreted as pro-secessionist, make me uneasy, as they provide plenty of constitutionally-mandated opportunities for ethnic, religious, linguistic and political strife which could simmer pointlessly or bring the entire system collapsing down in such a way that will make the invasion look even worse in the long run.
On the other hand, there are numerous parts of this text that I like. It at least attempts to redress the balance between the religious and secular sides of national life, and the management of the judicial branch in particular meets with my approval. An early article in the constitution includes the common-defense clause I first noticed in Afghanistan's constitution, which is a political concept I would like to see more of. Many of the requirements and limitations for various offices and powers don't seem arbitrary, and provide both a set of commonsense limitations and expectations as well as enough freedom of movement within them not to be too restrictive.
I don't like saying "history will tell," but that's the impression I'm getting from this. I worry that it's not going to work out and that Very Bad Things will happen within a year or two of the handover, which could fragment the region, result in a backlash towards a more extremist state, or even bring the Coalition back in force to pull the system apart and try again. I'm not going far enough to say the constitution looks like the framework for a puppet state, but it's the impression I get. The level of interference explicitly promised over the course of the occupation so far is leaving me with a vague sense of dread as to what's going on. In better hands, and more stable situations, this constitution could lead to an oasis of liberty and stability both in a region of relative chaos, yet another stepping stone to a liberation of the region which actually deserved the word, unlike the forceful topplings we in the west tend to obsess over.
The problem is that the transitional constitution is probably going to be little more than a good piece of legislation written at a very bad point in time.
Andante over at Collective Sigh points to this article on steroids in baseball (if you don't like registering for websites, use the NFZ account [username: nukefree@nukefreezone.net / password: nukefree]). And while the article is interesting mainly to watch the senate reactions to Donald Fehr, the leader of the baseball player's union, it brings up the alternate history in which Bud Selig had decided to make a certain scion of a former president baseball commissioner like that certain scion wanted.
In fact, I pondered this exact thing in my Livejournal last summer (Shrub being the commish of baseball instead of the president). Of course, the steroid issue wasn't as large as it is now, but it was still a fun thing to ponder. I said:
An alternate history in which a certain owner of a certain baseball club chooses to become the Commissioner of Major League Baseball instead of governor of his state.The point is, I'd prolly still be cursing the Shrub, but in my capacity as a San Francisco Giants baseball fan instead of my capacity as an American. :)
And a friend of mine, DamienRoc responded:
Cynically, I might say that baseball's loss would be the world's gain, and for that reason, I'd support the alternate history.HOWEVER, as much as I think Bush is a terrible president, I must admit that he may not be a halfway bad commish. He certainly can't be worse than Selig, and since he seems inclined towards hard-line tactics, and an inability to admit a weakness, it's likely he could have done a lot to improve the image of the game.
The whole thread is somewhat funny, and I may curse myself later for linking to my LiveJournal here, but you can find that thread here.
It does make you wonder how Shrub the Commish would have dealt with the steroid issue, though. I'll turn the floor over to folks who might be more knowlegeable than I.
(I ought to add a "sports" category, especially if I'm going to ask Pri to guespost again -- which I probably will.)
Reading blogs this morning, I find Fred Clark at Slacktivist wrote this wonderful entry about Bush's record. It starts by making a wonderful point about baseball statistics as if voting for the Hall of Fame was like the election for president. Then he points out that the worst opposition research on Kerry has found is that he's flip-flopped on issues in 19 years in the Senate, but that if Kerry is good at the gymnastics, then Bush himself is the grand master.
The quote that sums it all up?
"Consider, for example, that we had to rewrite a headline in the paper recently that referred to the 'record-breaking deficit.' The problem was it didn't tell readers which record-breaking deficit the story was about -- the budget deficit? the trade deficit? the pension insurance deficit? With this president, "record-breaking deficit" is a category.
The prosecution rests, your Honor.
MLPish stuff tonight, because I don't have enough energy to do much more...
Woah: Stem cell research suggests the possibility of extending fertility in women. You could probably also call it a cure for menopause. The social and political effects of this are... well, they'd be big. Really big.Of course, we need to know if it works in humans as well as does in mice first. Stay tuned.
Organize,
boys, we've gotta save a national treasure!: To the right you see the
latest Deep Field photo from the Hubble. In that shot, we're looking back literally
to when God was a teenager. And that jackass
O'Keefe wants to scrap it. I'll rant about this at some point in greater
detail, but I want everybody who reads this to understand three things:
I'd like to also note that Congressman (and recent Senate candidate) Mark Udall (D-CO) has introduced a bill to save the Hubble. I note this mainly because it's nice to see a Colorado politican taking the initiative and doing the right thing for once. I no longer need to be completely ashamed of my representatives.
Meanwhile, back in the Silly Season..: John Kerry's address to the Union of Concerned Scientists, showing that he has a pretty good grasp of the Things That Really Matter:
If we trust in the promise of new discoveries – and trust in the power of Americans to use them wisely – we will not go astray. But we cannot stand still. There are diseases to conquer, barriers to break, and horizons to cross. And as long as these challenges are there, America is moving forward. And we deserve a President who knows it. Thank you.
If: The BBC's new documentary series takes on plausible near-future secnarios in an attempt to make us think about our choices in the here and now. The concept sounds intriguing (reminds me in a way of James Burke's series on global warming from a while back) and I'll be looking out for it on BBC America; it just started running in Britain, so it'll be a bit before us colonials see it.
American engineering... sort of: The International Herald Tribune is reporting that Ford Motor Co. is buying hybrid technology from Toyota for their new Escape SUV. Well, at least it'll be fuel-efficient deathtrap...
So, surprisingly, it has been proposed that we let 14 year olds vote in state and local elections...sort of.
"When we gave the vote to those who didn't own property, then to women, then to persons of all colors, we added to the richness of our democratic dialogue and our own nation's integrity and its model for the world," Vasconcellos said, calling it time to further extend the vote.
It works like this. 14 and 15 year olds would have a quarter of a vote, and 16 and 17 year olds would have half a vote. Vasconcellos says "the Internet, cellular phones, multichannel television and a diverse society makes today's teens better informed than their predecessors."
It's a neat idea. I would have liked it when I was a California teenager, but I was into current events. I'm not sure I'd let some of my classmates vote, though. It's tricky, as with anything that involves an age line, some people are mature before the line, and some people aren't. And democracy seems to require that you allow everybody to vote. I'm not sure this would have the effect of getting teenagers interested in voting, and there's some really good arguments against.
On the other hand, I was frustrated as heck when I first got to Cal in the fall of 1996. I spent most of my first semester as an underage minor -- I was 17 when I went to college, and I turned 18 on November 21st -- two weeks after the election. And there were propositions on that ballot that I wanted to vote on. So I cast my first presidential ballot at 21, voting for Al Gore. So I would have loved to have the right to vote at 17. But that's a different case.
I don't really know if this is a good idea or not, but it should be interesting to see how it plays out. In the meantime, we're still probably the nuttiest state in the union.
Wow, Kevin Drum of Calpundit has made the big show.. Kevin's been a big hero of mine, and it's nice to know that somebody's actually *paying* him to blog.
Hopefully he doesn't forget all the little people. (He made my day once by commenting on the NFZ.) Hey Kev, if you're redoing links with your new blog, don't forget us! ;)
Now back to your regularly scheduled NFZ.
Bruce MacKinnon strikes again:
The New York Times brings us this piece of news:
Turks Breach Wall of Silence on Armenians
Taner Akcam doesn't seem like either a hero or a traitor, though he's been called both. A slight, soft-spoken man who chooses his words with care, Mr. Akcam, a Turkish sociologist and historian currently teaching at the University of Minnesota, writes about events that happened nearly a century ago in an empire that no longer exists: the mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. But in a world where history and identity are closely intertwined, where the past infects today's politics, his work, along with that of like-minded Turkish scholars, is breaking new ground.
Mr. Akcam, 50, is one of a handful of scholars who are challenging their homeland's insistent declarations that the organized slaughter of Armenians did not occur; and he is the first Turkish specialist to use the word "genocide" publicly in this context.
All I really have to say is "about damn time."
The Armenian genocide is one of those far-too-overlooked affairs of the twentieth century, and is one of the largest as well. The Turks' attempt to wipe out the Armenians as a whole - and the global apathy towards the affair - eventually spurred enough outrage to ignite a campaign to define - and outlaw - genocide which began with Raphael Lemkin's campaigning and began to show signs of success by the eighties, as Senator William Proxmire's nineteen-year harangue of the United States Senate finally caused Washington to - sort of - outlaw genocide.
The Armenian genocide is also the most vehemently-denied act of genocide still out there. Even the attempts by Canada and the United States, largely successful, to wipe out aboriginal culture recieves more acknowledgement. Authours who refer to the Armenian genocide as such invariably find themselves the target of threats and harassment - and not just in Turkey! - which has caused this act, almost a century old, to be forgotten by most of us.
If people in Turkey are finally beginning to acknowledge the fact that it actually occurred... well, that's one more brick in the wall, at least. The onus for doing something about stopping the damn things already is currently back in the hands of major western powers and the Security Council states. At the same time, however, nations which have actually had a hand in attempts to exterminate entire peoples need to get around to assuming responsibility for what they've done.
I have a couple articles brewing in my head, but I'm not totally far enough to really write either. I have a train ride ahead of me tomorrow, though, and an article on gifted programs saved to my hard drive that I want to talk about, and I'm thinking about writing a post about John Kerry. So we'll see if I can get some writing done on the train tomorrow.
Other things in the works is an FAQ about the Zone, followed by short bios of the Zoners. I'm going to let each of the individual Zoners write their own bio, and I'm going to try to figure out how to make archives of
