This, via CNN, leaves me absolutely speechless:
SKOPJE, Macedonia (AP) -- Macedonian police gunned down seven innocent immigrants, then claimed they were terrorists, in a killing staged to show they were participating in the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism, authorities said Friday.
Police spokeswoman Mirjana Konteska told reporters that six people, including three former police commanders, two special police officers and a businessman, have been charged by police with murder.
...
She described a meticulous plan to promote Macedonia as a player in the fight against global terrorism that involved smuggling the Pakistanis into Macedonia from Bulgaria, housing them, and then coldly gunning them down.
Even if I could find words right now, I wouldn't know which ones to use.
Now this is pretty seriously damn cool:
Scientists have developed what they say could become the world's smallest medical kit: a computer, made of DNA, that can diagnose disease and automatically dispense medicine to treat it.
The computer, so small that one trillion would fit into a drop of water, now works only in a test tube, and it could be decades before something like it is ready for practical use. But it offers an intriguing glimpse of a future in which molecular machines operate inside people, spotting diseases and treating them before noticeable symptoms even appear.
(...)
Experts called the work ingenious but pointed out that it had been done in a test tube, to which the RNA corresponding to the disease genes was added. It is not clear, they said, whether such a computer could work inside cells, where there would be many pieces of DNA, RNA and chemicals that could interfere.
"I think it's very elegant — it's almost like a beautiful mathematical proof," said Dr. George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. "But it's not working in human cells yet."
As a friend of the Zoners would say, "We're not gonna die, are we?"
Now, the tech is still a good long ways away from being ready to dump a load of nanodocs into your bloodstream, but this qualifies as a major first step towards the beginnings of a technically-augmented immune system.
These are indeed the days of miracle and wonder.
Courtesy of William, we have this image of various opinion polls from the New York Times and CBS. His commentary on it, "It's so purty. Like a whole bunch of Christmas trees on their side with the pointy end towards November," says it about as well as I could have.
Posts of substance hopefully to follow from one of the Zoners or another later tonight.
The Canadian Senate voted today to add gays and lesbians to the list of groups protected from speech inciting violence or genocide against them. This is probably something of a parting shot for NDP MP Svend Robinson, one of the major national figures of the Canadian left who got himself in a bit of trouble a couple weeks ago. Robinson had been trying to get a bill of this sort passed for about ten years, and finally accomplished it on a private member's bill - something very unusual in Canadian federal politics, especially for something so sweeping.
The voting disparity between the Senate's vote and the House of Commons vote last September is striking - 85% of the senators supported the law, while the Commons vote was an almost even split. A whole hell of a lot of people abstained in each vote - 48 MPs and 35 senators.
The whole gay rights issue has been flying back and forth through Canadian politics since last year, when some Supreme Court rulings established a set of rights which are causing the same cry of "activist judges!" that the United States is experiencing right now. The division in Parliament is interesting because we're getting to see one of the purposes of the Senate at work.
The Canadian Senate operates differently from the American one in that the members are appointed generally for life, but the general idea of keeping them around longer exists both here and south of the border. From that springs the whole idea of "sober second thought," a second level of the legislature that has a bit more leeway to take unpopular but necessary stands without worrying about the Wrath of the Electorate right around the corner. It's kind of visible in the fact that the Senate vote was far more in favor than the House vote, though stacking and the number of abstentions on both floors is a bit telling. The Commons vote probably gives a better idea of the voters' views on the issue than the Senate's vote, which shows the division in the country on the issue.
The objections to the hate speech protections seem a bit alarmist, but on the other hand there's some point to them. Canada has a fairly harsh stance on hate literature - not to the extent that a country like modern Germany does, but considerably moreso than the United States. For instance, you can't get something like The Turner Diaries here. As a result, the concern is getting raised about things like the Bible or other religious texts which merrily advocate slaying one group or another being declared hate speech. This is one of those weird things where I don't exactly think that would be an issue, but I also can't find myself able to coherently explain why. Either way, despite not officially having a separation of church and state, we seem to do a pretty good job of keeping up at least a vague form of a wall between the two. Considering the two. We'll see how it goes, I suppose.
CBC also has a section of their site which goes into depth on the issue, giving a fairly comprehensive overview of the debate and showing a bit of how the Canadian Supreme Court functions around such issues. Worth a brief glance at least, if you're following the issue either in the US or in Canada.
The University of Maryland Program on International Policy Attitudes recently released a report showing a significant chunk of respondents to be deeply misinformed about Iraq (warning: PDF). It's not as bad as when an absurdly large percentage believed Iraq had nuked US troops in the field, but it's still pretty bad.
The pollsters also asked who the respondents planned to vote for. Not surprisingly, knowledge of the Iraq invasion (and lack thereof) figures greatly into voting plans:
These are the two most extreme cherrypicked examples, of course, but it's telling, and the poll is worth reading. One interesting finding is that no matter how much the media harps on US casualties, the perceived number of casualties doesn't correlate to respondents' opinion of the invasion's righteousness.
Thanks to Larry over at Silence is Consent, I came across an article from the Cato Institute which discusses whether the United States is an empire or not at the moment, with the added question of empire is necessarily good or bad.
But while the president may shy away from the term empire, the conduct of our foreign policy is clearly guided by a presumption that the United States is, and should be, the world's only superpower. The National Security Strategy declares that the United States shall maintain its predominant position in the world at all costs, even acting preemptively if and when would-be rivals emerge, or appear likely to emerge.
But while the possession of a military force that is second-to-none might appear on the surface to be a manifestation of imperial domination, the proponents of empire claim that the United States is not really an empire because it has noble intentions. The Bush National Security Strategy pledges to reshape the world according to our image, and establishes as a core object of U.S. policy the creation of a world that is "not just safer but better."
Christopher Preble's article argues that yes it is, and it is bad, respectively, and does so in a decent and readable manner. The article is a plug for the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, an organization which calls for an alternative to might-makes-right politics.
The issue of whether the US - or any country which doesn't explicitly identify itself as such - is an empire is of course going to be a sticky one, composed mostly of semantic juggling. Traditionally, empires have kind of stuck to the pornography rule for identification - you know them when you see them - but there's a large gulf between entities such as the Third Reich or Rome, the British Empire, and whatever the current US geopolitical organization is. Is it possible for a benevolent empire to exist? Does the intent of imperialism shape the quality of the empires created by it? How do you measure any of these qualities, anyway?
I don't expect the issue of whether or not the US is - or is trying to be - an imperial power to exactly show up during the election campaign; it would step all over too many traditional American sensibilities to be a safe topic of conversation by either candidate. On the other hand, the argument's been coming up more and more in the past couple of years, from organizations like the CRFP, other organizations which support the idea of an imperial superpower quite openly, and more grassroots discussion at levels like this one.
Whatever happens over the next year, I predict that the imperialism meme will become an increasingly hot topic for discussion (or bar-fights), and not just by the activist fringe, either.
What do you think?
The new flag is white, with two parallel blue strips across the bottom representing the rivers and a yellow stripe between them representing Iraq’s Kurdish minority. Above the stripes is a blue crescent representing Islam.
It's good to see them dump the Hejaz colours, which were often used to symbolize Arab supremacy in the last century. With the crescent as the centerpiece of the new flag, it looks like they've given up on the idea of a secular democracy. Actually, it looks a little like Israel's flag. No wonder the US wanted them to change the crescent's colour.
I imagine the flag might become a divisive issue, with supporters of the old regime and enemies of the US continuing to fly the old flag. At least the "bad guys" will be easier to spot.
So. Folks are reporting that a largescale chemical weapons attack has been thwarted in the Jordanian capital. Considering the attack was intended to kill tens of thousands (whether it would have is a different question, as Aum Shinrikyo showed us a few years ago), it is understandable that it should be all over the appropriate headlines and front pages.
So why are people only now taking notice of something which reached the BBC twelve days ago?
Really now, guys. I know it's only been two weeks, but it wouldn't strain your delicate little heads to stay on top of things like this instead of what Michael Jackson had for breakfast this morning.
John Doyle over at the Globe and Mail found himself in Bill O'Reilly's crosshairs over the past week, when the FOX News creature decided to declare the G&M a "far left" publication. After doing so, Doyle was exposed at some length to the views of FOX's viewers. It says something about the mindset of said readers, certainly.
We've only had a fraction of this kinda response happen at the Zone, and then only once. I feel almost disappointed. I can just see NFZ being described by one group or another as a far-right blog...
Via the Beeb, the article I mentioned the other day:
Caution urged over bio researchScientists must ensure research details do not fall into terrorists' hands, say experts.
The Royal Society says scientists have a clear responsibility not to work on the illegal development of weapons.
But they will tell a UN conference researchers must be careful about publicising legitimate research which could be used to cause harm.
For most of a decade, and especially in the past couple of years since the anthrax scare, a growing conflict between science and politics has been brewing. The main thrust of it lately has been towards Keeping Us Safe From The Terrorist Hordes; other recent attempts include strong political pressure against stem cell research (based off the laughable idea that all stem cells are human beings!) and strong social pressure against things such as biotechnology and nanotechnology as entire disciplines.
Traditionally this has carried implications like "don't think about thinking about this" - value judgements that declare a technology itself to be evil. The stem cell and cloning issues are the examples of this today, in terms of government pressure - the moment the feasibility of the technology came about, people immediately began to try to prepare and enforce a global ban on even thinking about cloning. Social pressure is aimed towards genetic engineering, anything with the word "nuclear," and to a lesser extent nanotechnology thanks to Bill Joy-esque ideas that nanotech is the Gray Goo Catastrophe and nothing more; however, there hasn't been much actual government pressure to suppress these fields.
A new type of pressure - the kind mentioned in the BBC article I link here - has been showing up for about a year and a half, however: pressure not to cease research, but to heavily censor publications in an attempt to keep the knowledge secret somehow. The latest change seems to be moderately more polite in that they're asking the scientists if they would please censor themselves, rather than cutting up their papers without warning.
There're a few problems with this whole idea in general. One of the main ones is the sheer uselessness of the concept. Security through obscurity simply does not work in the long run as an idea, unless one body or another successfully managed to suppress all research, worldwide, in a given field. A large part of the focus against scientific articles these days has been removing the methodology sections where they mention something potentially weaponizable - which can be just about anything, if you're vague enough. (I mean, geeze, if I talk about building a centrifuge it could potentially be used to produce nuclear weapons!) This kneecaps the entire concept of peer review by making experiments unrepeatable without asking the original authour for his or her methodology - which defeats the point of censoring it in the first place. As well, this kind of block is frankly dangerous, depending on the type of research being performed in an increasingly precise scientific world. I'd really like to know exactly what I'm supposed to do to reproduce a result, rather than risking time or personal safety to blindly guess at it. The whole point of publication is to eliminate those roadblocks.
The worst thing about this, however, is the sheer ignorance of the idea. People are talking about this Post-September-11 world as though something has actually changed in terrorist circles at a fundamental level. Nothing has. They got lucky; The Terrorists (I use the term as though They are a single bloc, which is obviously not true) did not abruptly become more talented and powerful because they hit the US in its own home. The world may have become more dangerous since, but I have other people I blame for that. Either way, madly scrambling to block all knowledge because of this is silly. The basic knowledge is out there, even if it is considerably more complex than most people think.
I doubt the pressure is coming from within academia as much as from governments and social pressure in general, however. The idea has come out in the past while about the "ease" of making chemical and biological weapons, how any whackjob with someone else's credit card and a PO box can just call Dial-A-Plague, pick up a liter of HIV, and modify it to be transmitted through the air in the comfort his his living room. This is, simply, a load of crap that only maintains itself because of the frightful ignorance people have towards science anymore.
While it is fairly easy to produce nasty chemical weapons at home - and even possess them, given the stuff that's stored underneath most kitchen sinks - weaponizing has only been pulled off a couple of times. Aside from the prevented attack in Jordan, the only ones that come to mind for me are the Japan sarin attacks, and a whoopsie in Bulgaria after someone dropped a tear gas grenade. I'm not saying attacks are impossible; I am saying that unless someone actually steals a nuclear weapon and uses it properly, people will be able to get a lot more bang for their buck out of some cheap explosives.
Biological weapons are even more complex; the one bioterrorist attack I recall hearing of was the pitifully inept anthrax attacks in the US in 2001. The "ease" of making these kinds of weapons comes out of those same, unsubstantiated "you can do it in your kitchen!" claims, often by saying things like "monkeypox shares 98% of its genes with smallpox!" while leaving out the fact that a dog probably shares about 95% of its genes with humanity. This doesn't mean it's exactly simple to turn a dog into a human yet.
"This just in: modifying a mere 25% of a human's genome will turn him into bubonic plague! We must prevent this menace from proli - er, wait..."
Well, yeah. This post originally started out with some kind of actual specific point in mind, but it quickly devolved into one of my standard rants. Suffice to say, the anti-knowledge attitude going towards technology these days is both infuriating and dangerous. A better solution, in my ever-so-humble opinion, would be to blow the doors wide open and ensure an even more open access to this sort of thing. The problem with security through obscurity is that it breeds complacency; people start deciding it's pointless to worry about X because, well, X won't happen now, will it? This isn't quite openly begging for X to happen, but it certainly makes it easier to get away with. Far better to make sure people know what's out there, up to and including the risks, to produce a pressure to adapt to them in a way that will be useful if something happens.
There's something to be said for knowing the possibilities and being prepared for them at the same time. It's a sad state of affairs when people begin actively seaking unpreparedness because knowing how to cope with the real world involves a bit more effort than they're willing to undertake. It's not as hard to have a basic understanding of technologies as many people tend to believe; it just takes a (very small) amount of effort and initiative. The specialization can be left to the specialists, but even a basic understanding of the world around us - something far too many people lack - can help people make more informed decisions about things as well as know what is and is not a threatening concern. If there is some menace lurking over one horizon or another, I'd be far happier if a lot of people knew about it so they could react intelligently, rather than tending towards the panic we see so often now at anything that isn't understood. Augh.
As it stands, this program of deliberate ignorance of the scientific is only going to cause problems down the road. A society that actually knows the score about things has a far better chance both of staying safe and of accomplishing great things over time. People, however, seem to be trying to pressure researchers towards a society where every door is locked, every window barred, and every timid citizen cowering under the bed to hide from a fear they've denied themselves even the ability to name.
A while back, Primis introduced me to the story of Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals football star who left the game to serve in Afghanistan with his brother Kevin, who himself left a promising baseball career.
It shocked me to hear that Pat Tillman was killed in combat yesterday.
Why does this shock me when so many hundreds of other US soldiers died in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the thousands on the other sides? Why him more than anyone else?
It is too easy to ignore what is going on, to see names and numbers as nothing more than ink on a newspaper. Even with only a passing familiarity with the name of Pat Tillman, his death makes it real. By his celebrity, Tillman becomes a symbol for the sacrifice all soldiers make: leaving their careers, leaving their families, and risking their deaths for a cause.
I leave you with Primis's journal entry, where he expresses some things that I just couldn't put into words.
I came across this at the BBC today, about the idea of growing self-censorship in scientific literature.
Just bringing it up for your notice; I'll probably have more to say on it tomorrow once I start writing more here.
BREAKING NEWS MSNBC News Services Updated: 11:41 a.m. ET April 22, 2004SEOUL, South Korea - North Korean authorities declared a state of emergency Thursday in the region where two fuel trains collided and exploded, killing or injuring as many as 3,000 people, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported.The report did not give details, but said officials of the secretive North Korean government had put in place a "type of state of emergency" around the town of Ryongchon, near the Chinese border.
In a sign of the accident's magnitude, the North Koran government also cut international phone lines to prevent news of the crash from leaking across its borders, Yonhap said, citing no sources.
South Korea's YTN television station reported that up to 3,000 people were killed or injured in the massive blast, which occurred when two freight trains collided in a North Korean station hours after leader Kim Jong-il had passed through.
Many of us who follow politics don't plan to vote for Kerry as much as to vote against Bush. Alan Blevins will be putting such thoughts to words at his new site, John Kerry Is A Douchebag But I'm Voting For Him Anyway. Hopefully, it will live up to its potential.
Via CNN:
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A U.S. congressman was briefly detained at a Kentucky airport Tuesday after authorities found a loaded gun in his bag at a screening checkpoint, authorities said.
Rep. John Hostettler, R-Indiana, "completely forgot" he had the gun in his bag as he prepared to take a US Airways flight to Washington for the first day of work after a two-week recess, a spokesman for the congressman said.
Let's see. This guy (A) "forgot" where his handgun was, which is almost excusable, except he (B) had it loaded in a piece of baggage in the first place.
I mean, really. I can't even say anything about this, because the story says it all.
Enough people like this skulking about and I'll need to find a different hobby. Augh.
Thanks to fellow SIMS student Joseph Hall for the pointer to this piece of news:
Attorneys for Diebold Election Systems Inc. warned in late November that its use of uncertified vote-counting software in Alameda County violated California election law and broke its $12.7 million contract with Alameda County.Soon after, a review of internal legal memos obtained by the Oakland Tribune shows Diebold's attorneys at the Los Angeles office of Jones Day realized the McKinney, Texas-based firm also faced a threat of criminal charges and exile from California elections.
Yet despite warnings from the state's chief elections officer, Diebold continued fielding poorly tested, faulty software and hardware in at least two of California's largest urban counties during the Super Tuesday primary, when e-voting temporarily broke down and voters were turned away at the polls.
To see the mess that was caused by this, I refer you back to Uncle Diebold's Clubhouse, a report on the March election by NFZ correspondent jrenken.
It should be interesting to see how this plays out. If Kevin Shelley, the California Secretary of State, bans Diebold machines from the november election, two of the bigger and more urban counties in the state -- Alameda and San Diego -- might be in a world of hurt. But on the other hand, I don't understand why we need electronic voting in the first place...
Over at AntiWar.com (note: it's an anti-war site), Matt Barganier points out how the right-wing side of the blogosphere cottons up their ears and spits fire when even their stars point out that not all is well in Iraq.
I barely caught Kerry's interview with Russert on Meet the Press. Kerry was quite the artful dodger, refusing to answer several questions and dissembling on others. Don't have the time for a big writeup.
Ansar chemical bomb materials seized in Jordan. They say this could have killed people in about a half kilometer radius if they'd finished building it and set it off. There is now a group with the know-how and will to do this kind of large-scale attack, and information isn't bottled up easily.
via Plastic, CIA Director George Tenet claimed under oath that he "didn't see the President" between August 6 and September 10 2001 because Bush was on vacation, but Bush noted Tenet being at the ranch on August 24 at the time.
Visit the Scenic Nuke Free Zone (Article courtesy William)
Yeah, it's the city of Berkeley this blog takes its name from, because the founder (that would be me) is a graduate and student at the University there, and I fell in love with the town. I live in Oakland these days, which is the other half of that article. Enjoy.
I gave Moqtada Sadr entirely too much credit in my earlier writings. It seems Sadr started out as a terrorist, threatening to kill Sistani and other Shiite leaders when he first returned to Iraq (no wonder Sistani doesn't support him!). The reason he didn't attack the US at the first opportunity wasn't because he was clever as I'd presumed and claimed, it was because he didn't have much of a force to attack with. It seems the Hamza militia was mostly created over the summer of last year.
Now it turns out that there is a whole big long list of Sadr's crimes against Iraq, apparently bolstered by evidence and testimony. Sadr's been trying to play The Great Game without a d20, and the Iraqis are pushing back. He's going down hard.
Welp, Israel isn't screwing around with Hamas anymore, from the looks of it. Israel implied Rantisi was going to be a target pretty much from the moment he emerged as Hamas' new leader, so I can't say I'm terribly surprised.
We'll see where this goes. I doubt it will be anywhere pleasant, but this is something new coming out of Israel, so I'm not going to pretend to predict the future.
I've been busy with a bunch of other projects, and slacking horribly on the final one that I need to graduate from SIMS with. And the fiction-writing bug appears to have bit, after having been baited horribly by a friend (y'know him as the Fourth Man 'round these parts), so I've been otherwise occupied.
But I wanted to share a few things pulled out of the local altweekly rags that y'all might find interesting.
First, there was this neat article in the the East Bay Express on the Berkeley Lower Extremities Exoskeleton, or BLEEX. While the whole project's neat, and it's really fun to look at and say, "Yay! Go Cal!", it was this quote from near the end of the article that got me thinking.
"And for those who think that being draped in machinery and communications gear is only for soldiers, he points out that ordinary people have turned themselves into mini-cyborgs thanks to the portable technology they carry with them every day. Take the cell phone; it's small, noninvasive, and it gives people a power once unimaginable -- the ability to instantaneously talk from anywhere to someone on the other side of the world. Or how about the technologies many of us wear every day without even noticing: watches, contact lenses, pacemakers, hearing aids. Could there be a day when people strap on exoskeletons as blithely as we put on our glasses?"
As somebody who's had a lot of interesting debates over the nature of transhumanism with Zibblsnrt (although our arguments have centered around genetic engineering more than anything else), this quote gave me a lot of food for thought. I wear glasses. I wear a watch. I often have my cell phone and laptop on or near me. But I never thought of this in terms of the debate, so it's something I need to think about.
Although I still have some reservations about genetic engineering...
Anyway, the other article I found interesting was an article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian about taxation and exemption on office buildings downtown. This article cuts at the heart of what Proposition 13 has done to the state of California. Unfortunately, Prop. 13 is the third rail of California politics, and any attempt to fix this will probably not come off well. Too bad, 'cause I like my state, and this really does need to be fixed somehow.
And that's about all that's on my mind at the moment, share what's on yours in the comments. :)
Caught this on the BBC this evening; stuff along these lines has been alluded to over the past week or so in various news sources. It's looking like the Administration is starting to take a Stance on North Korea of all nations.
I'm trying to figure out what's going on here. The general attitude towards North Korea's one of the more baffling things I've seen out of the past few years - and I try to pay attention to the news as much as possible, so let me tell you that's pretty damn baffling. A few series of 180s on policies towards North Korea have reverted it from a country which was willing to grant concessions to a corner.
Lately referring to Bush's stance towards North Korea as trying to negotiate with someone who has a dagger in their belt, North Korea's been getting increasingly aggressive to the point of not quite threatening first use of nuclear weapons. For the most part this is a direct result of the highhanded attitude towards them, and the fact that we're seeing things like Cheney's ridiculous implication that North Korea and al-Qaeda are in cahoots is making me wonder just what the hell is going on here.
I'm of a mixed mind on things. If there's one country whose leadership could go without me feeling too much guilt, it's North Korea's (actually, there's a few others, but that makes that sentence suck, much like this sidebar is. The life of the amateur rhetorician..). On the other hand, headway was being made in negotiations by the regional powers before the unilateralist "doing things our way is the only acceptable option" meme kicked in a couple of years ago. Suddenly, the progress of several years worth of negotiation's gone. And now people seem to be actively provoking Pyongyang even more. If there's a single country that has nothing to lose, it seems to be the one being shoved even further into the corner right now.
Just what's going on with this? Does Washington want a war on the Korean Peninsula or something?
A lot of people who disagree with Bush are being accused of supporting the enemy. Well, here are some people actually supporting the enemy. Everybody point and laugh.
Thanks to Andrew Wyatt for the link.
All the trouble in Iraq is being caused by three factions: Saddam Hussein and The Terrorists, The Terrorists, and al-Sadr and The Terrorists. The prominent Shia cleric al-Sadr is evil because he killed a prominent Shia cleric, so we're going to kill him. If The Terrorists somehow throw off our military dictatorship and institute a government run by Iraqis for Iraqis, that would destroy the democratic hopes of the Iraqi people.
It's not a civil war because everyone's attacking us instead of each other. It's not a popular uprising even if most of the people in certain areas oppose us out of their genuine free will, because there are other areas where the people don't oppose us and I know the English language better than those Old Europeans in Oxford who would misdefine "popular" as "supported by the people".
In all the proceedings of the Iraqi Governing Council, Iraqis have expressed clear commitments. They want strong protections for individual rights as far as allowed by Taliban Shari'a; they want their independence, from, uh, us; and they want their freedom from, uh, us.
America's commitment to freedom in Iraq is consistent with our ideals -- nice theories but in reality we never stand for them -- and required by our commercial interests. Iraq will either be a peaceful, democratic country or it will again be an evil menace threatening our future, because God forbid there are any friendly monarchies or republics. By helping to secure a free Iraq, Americans serving in that country are protecting their fellow citizens because ever since we went into that country the people there have been wanting to kill us.
This weekend, at a Fort Hood hospital, I presented a Purple Heart to some of our wounded who wondered where the hell I was when I didn't need the troops to raise my approval rating and why my party is at this time belittling the three Purple Hearts that my opponent John Kerry earned. America's armed forces are performing brilliantly at gunning down innocent civilians, with all the skill and honor we expect of them; since honoring the troops is mandatory, we don't expect much there, you see. I'll send reinforcements even if Don Rumsfeld doesn't want me to. The people of our country are united behind our men and women in uniform who decided on their own, with no direction from us politicians, to invade Iraq.
We're definitely going to transfer power back to the Iraqi people on June 30, we just have to figure out which one of the Iraqi people we're going to transfer the power back to. Iraqis do not support an indefinite occupation, but this has absolutely nothing to do with all the Iraqis shooting at us while calling for an end to the occupation, and neither does America, which you can see in my plunging approval ratings.
We're not an imperial power, as can be attested by nations such as Haiti, Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, Cuba, the Philippines, Mexico, Shoshone, Sioux, Cheyenne, Cherokee, Nez Perce, Delaware, the Iroquois confederacy... forget I said that. America's objective in Iraq is to seek an independent, free and secure Iraq as long as they do what we tell them to.
The Terrorists in Iraq are all the same type of guys as al-Qaeda. It's not a religious issue even though the only Terrorists I see are all Muslims. Any concession or retreat on our part will only embolden this type of enemy and invite more bloodshed which is why I'm asking Israel to surrender more of the West Bank.
Saddam Hussein was an ally of al-Qaeda despite what all my intelligence analysts say and all the bad stuff they said about wanting to kill each other.
In this conflict, there is no safe alternative to mindless violence. We dare not think about the possible consequences of our actions before going ahead with them, so when we inevitably fuck up and our political opponents point it out, we can accuse them of supporting The Terrorists.
Now for your questions. I hope they're scripted like they were in that other press conference, but I'll take my chances.
Q: It's a quagmire! A QUAGMIRE! It's Vietnam all over again! Five hundred a year, five hundred a week, what's the difference? By the way, your poll numbers suck.
A: The only analogy to the Vietnam era is that you're smoking something. Oh, and if you don't support me, you're a traitor.
As for my poll numbers, my political advisors Karl Rove and Karen Hughes can tell you that I never take popular opinion into account for any of my actions.
Q: Didn't you say we'd be greeted as liberators and that oil money would pay for the war? And what happened to all that WMD?
A: The WMD was there because the intelligence said it was even though it didn't, and it magically disappeared the moment we set foot in the country. The United Nations fully supported our invasion with no reservations. The oil revenues were originally planned to pay for 100% of the war costs but production is even higher than expected, so we now need $87 billion/year from Congress. And finally, the Iraqi people are greeting us as liberators, they're just very confused.
Q: Don't you feel bad about not doing anything about al-Qaeda prior to 9/11?
A: Yeah, but afterwards I got us the Patriot Act to defend our freedoms.
Q: Are you ever going to admit it was a mistake to not do anything about al-Qaeda prior to 9/11?
A: No, because I didn't put us on a war footing like Al Gore asked me to, so it's not my fault.
Q: What did you do after receiving the August 6 briefing?
A: I asked for the briefing. When I got it, it didn't seem that important.
Q: The August 6 memo says there were 70 FBI investigations against al-Qaeda cells in the US, but FBI personnel who were there at the time openly mock that number as an exaggeration. What's the deal?
A: Ask the 9/11 commission.
Q: Counterterrorism official Richard Clarke apologised for fucking up his job and letting bin Laden through. Are you going to apologise?
A: Hell no.
Q: Most of our coalition members are sending piddly little contingents of ten or a hundred men, and the second or third largest force is a gang of mercenaries. What the hell kind of coalition is this?
A: How dare you demean the honour of our mighty allies! Racist!
Q: Why the won't you meet with the 9/11 commission without Dick Cheney holding your hand?
A: Because the commission wants to ask me difficult questions.
Q: Iraq would have produced another September 11 if we hadn't invaded! Go insult some liberals who think otherwise.
A: Liberals say we should have attacked al-Qaeda before September 11 and that we shouldn't have invaded Iraq until they tried actually building WMD or supporting anti-US terrorists. Aren't liberals funny?
We can no longer use limited means to fight terrorists, but must go on the offensive and use our full military might to attack suspected terrorists before they become a threat. The American people need to know my last choice is the use of military power.
Q: Did anybody tell you your poll numbers are going down?
A: I've got a secret plan to win the war.
Q: What's the biggest mistake you've made since 9/11?
A: Damn it, that one wasn't scripted. Actually, I've been perfect in fighting terrorism. Although I've probably made some minor error in some trivial program, I can't think of anything I've actually done wrong.
Q: The FBI's petitioning you for help to cut through your administration's red tape, but you as the President are calling for someone else to do it. When are you going to get off your ass and take responsibility?
A: Isn't that Director Mueller's job? No, let's wait for the 9/11 commission to make a political issue out of it. No, let's.. umm... the War on Terrorism is going to be a long war, longer than this misdirection. I like freedom. Democrats don't. I've seen freedom work right here in our own country, and I believe there ought to be limits to freedom, especially the freedom to criticise me, and we'd be much better off if this country were a dictatorship as long as I'm the dictator.
Now for the final question. Anyone who asks permission will not be called on.
Q: Hey, anyone tell you your poll numbers are dropping? Do you think your message isn't getting out to the American people, or are they just realizing that you're full of shit?
A: We'll see in November.
Not much to say today, but on behalf of the starry-eyed membership of the NFZ I'd like to wish our readership a very happy Yuri's Night.
"What the hell is Yuri's Night?" Well, it's the annual celebration of the first manned spaceflight in human history, April 12 1961, Yuri Gagarin and Vostok 1. It's also the anniversary of the first flight of the space shuttle Columbia. Everybody who celebrates Yuri's Night has a different specific reason for doing it, but the general celebration is all about humanity reaching beyond the planet for the very first time.
So drink a toast to Yuri Gagarin, the first of many.
As noted by Juan Cole, buried at the bottom of this AP article about fighting in and around Falluja is that the Governing Council condemned the US for using "collective punishment" against Falluja and demanding the US cease operations there.
In what's likely related, a British officer compared the US troops to Nazis, saying the soldiers don't see Iraqis as human and are basically shooting everything in sight.
Finally, we have that the new Iraqi army refuses to fight other Iraqis. This will make it really hard for the new government to maintain control over the militias, since the point of a central government is to centrally govern its territory.
The White House actually gave in and released the August 6 Memo. No smoking guns about Sep11 -- in fact, not a whole heck of a lot at all - but there's this passage:
Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers bin Laden-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives."
Recall that, under oath, Condoleezza Rice denied that the memo "warned against possible attacks in this country" in Richard Ben-Veniste's words, instead saying that "It did not warn of attacks inside the United States. It was historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat information. And it did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States."
That smells like perjury, but is it? Rice also refused to answer direct questions about whether the memo contained information it did, leaving the impression that it didn't. These denials are soft enough that a good lawyer can get her out of them. As for the choice quote, Rice had also said that "the briefing item reviewed past intelligence reporting, mostly dating from the 1990s, regarding possible al Qaeda plans to attack inside the United States". Is she simply taking both sides of the issue (while under oath), or being specific as to the definition of 'warn'?
This administration's officials are experts at saying one thing, meaning another, and leaving you thinking they said a third. Since her testimony is so amorphous, I wouldn't expect to see a criminal investigation and wouldn't expect an investigation to succeed if we saw one. Similarly, nothing in Rice's speech is clear enough to change minds. People are going to take the interpretation they like and believe what they want to.
Winds of Change has good articles about Sadr's background and Iraqi militias fighting back against Sadr and winning.
Juan Cole also has lots of Sadr information filling up his front page, including a claim that Sadr has declared a ceasefire.
Here's the requisite link to my earlier article about Sadr
There's been some nasty racist graffiti painted on the mens' room walls at the junior college I attend. You know the stuff - lots of swearing, the only word with more than one syllable starts with an N, and so on. Student Michael Schaffer wouldn't stand for this bigotry, and decided to do something about it.
To raise awareness of the issue of racism on our campus, Schaffer collected photographs of some of the vile slurs and slanders and made a poster. To this he added a statement against the racist graffit, words that he unironically calls a "testament to the fears of an uninformed heart":
After coming to a country that was already established and culturally rich, murdering and enslaving the people, stealing the wealth of these nations to gabble away and use to fund wars in the name of compassionate, forgiving, understanding Jesus Christ with no understand or respect for the meaning of these golden emblems or the person you wage war for.
After stealing a people from their homeland, erasing the culture, replacing tradition with a white Jesus Christ, enslaving these people for four hundred years to build the industry and government we live under now, and ending the non-violent campaign of Martin Luther King Jr. and passionate voice Malcolm X with bullets instead of intellect or respect.
After Cesear Chavez and his people fought non-violently with mind, body, and soul simply for a wage that could sustain a family, put children through school, cloths on their backs, and food on the table three times a day.
We continue to perpetuate the sense of difference and found-less feeling of superiority of whiteness by allowing janitors -- people of color here at SRJC -- scrub racist graffiti directed towards them off the walls of our urine and feces reeking restrooms.
So there's the solution: fight bigoted hate speech with, uh, bigoted hate speech. Given the upswing in "white pride" organizations around here, I'm surprised there hasn't been a protest, although a dozen copies of the poster were destroyed the same day he put them up. The bigger surprise was that this message was "overwhelmingly approved" by the Inter-Club Council. This is from the school paper dated March 24, and does not appear to be an April Fool's joke. I didn't try to confirm it, though.
Caught this piece of news from Just A Bump In The Beltway - apparently Blackwater Security's boys managed to bail Coalition troops out in an assault on the CPA's headquarters in Iraq. Basically, a bunch of mercs managed to make use of their resources, and their own air support, to throw back the assaults on the place long enough for the American armed forces to eventually react.
Now, on the one hand, this definately ranks among Noteworthy Accomplishments of the war and occupation so far. I'm sure that Blackwater's stock - and hiring prices - will go up considerably in the next few days. On the other hand, the headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority was just successfully defended by mercenaries, rather than the national militaries supposedly keeping the peace in the area. While I can't help but admire the eight (eight!) individuals who held the compound against however many attackers, they were still mercenaries doing the work because the 150-someodd thousand soldiers currently in Iraq are not enough to keep the country pacified.
But just keep listening to Mr. Bremer - everything's A-okay, as long as you're not in a major city, large or small town, or village with enough Kalashnikov rounds sitting around unused...
Every now and then there's a survey that comes out showing that X number of Americans believe in angels, or that Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landings, or that Saddam was behind 9/11, and we all get to lament about how America is a country full of morons, and how we need to combat this horrible disease, etc. etc.
Well, it turns out that ignorance and stupidity are the true international languages:
The Battle of Hastings never took place and Adolf Hitler is a fictional character. Robin Hood really existed, Harold Wilson saved Britain during the Second World War and Conan the Barbarian is a bona fide figure from early Nordic history.
(...)
Researchers, who conducted face-to-face interviews with more than 2,000 people, found that almost a third of the population thinks the Cold War was not real and 6 per cent believeThe War of the Worlds, H G Wells's fictional account of a Martian invasion, did happen.
Some 57 per cent think King Arthur existed and 5 per cent accept that Conan the Barbarian, the warrior played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in a 1982 film, used to stalk the planet for real. Almost one in two believe William Wallace, the 13th-century Scottish resistance leader played by Mel Gibson in his film Braveheart, was invented for the silver screen.
The article goes on to blame Hollywood for being more interesting than history classes, which is I suppose true for a certain value of "history classes." (No doubt Zibblsnrt will weigh in at length about this elsewhere.) Or maybe the good people of Great Britain are smarter than we'd like to think and have actually figured out what's really going on. God knows the Cold War felt pretty unreal, at least the part I lived through did...
(via Ken MacLeod)
Via Crooked Timber and a few Livejournals, I came across a particularly disturbing piece of news with regards to some Google searching.
See, if you go to Google and search for the word Jew, the first hit on the list is a hate site called "Jew Watch," which you can quite easily find but I shan't dignify with a link here. I'm kind of curious as to how such a site got to the top of Google's search listing; I know it's not their fault, but more the fault of however many thousands of bigoted fuckwits decided that Jew Watch was a great site to refer people curious about what the word "Jew" means to.
Now, given Google's methodology, there's a way you can do something about this. Many of you are familiar with the idea of Google Bombing, which I rarely of course advocate, but here I am asking you to do it for a good end - knocking that hate site off the top of the listings. It's pretty simple, really. I'm asking you guys to take the word Jew, and link it to something that isn't Jew Watch. The Wikipedia article on the Jews seems to be the accepted destination for now, and has actually jumped from #4 or #5 on the list to #2, right below the other site, since I started this article.
So come on, folks. Get your linking on!
The other day, I was putting together a little piece on Moqtada al Sadr but never got around to finishing it. At the end, I proposed that Sadr was a moderate threat to the US's interests, but predicted that the United States wouldn't go after Sadr right now because of the violence that would erupt as a result.
It looks like I made a mistake.
Sadr is dangerous because he has been clever. Where more hotheaded leaders have attacked their enemies at the first opportunity and been destroyed, Sadr has foregone several opportunites, waiting and building his power base. Sadr has loudly denounced the US but he has also rejected terrorism and called for any resistance against the occupation to be peaceful (though "for now" is always implied). At the same time, he has been forming a militia just in case. The long-term threat from Sadr comes from his hatred for the United States and his friendship with Iran, as an Iraq-Iran alliance would threaten the instability of the Middle East and control a significant chunk of the world's oil supply.
The events of the past week look like a series of provocations by the US. After shutting down Sadr's newspaper didn't garner much of a response other than people throwing themselves under the tanks the US sent against the protesters, the US arrested Sadr's aide Sayyid Mustafa Jaffar al-Yacoubi Mustafa al-Yacoubi, leading to protests that turned violent. According to that same Australian article, the US has accused Yacoubi of being in the mob that lynched Majid al Khoei and Haider al Kadar last April.
All signs point towards this being a manufactured crisis by the United States to eliminate one of Iraq's most popular leaders by coercing him to go over the line and do something stupid. Sadr may have bit the bait. Israel Radio is claiming that Sadr has ordered his followers to "terrorise your enemy", though the Associated Press says he did not say that. That AP story also has Sadr pledging a military alliance with Hamas, which could be enough for the US to act against him.
The latest is that Sadr's people are fighting back against the US, which is trying to exert control over Sadr City (formerly Saddam City, now named for Sadr's father who was executed by Saddam). Expect to see Sadr derided in the US papers as a "terrorist" or even as a "Ba'athist" despite that his fame comes from his and his father's opposition to the Ba'ath Party.
Sadr doesn't have the power to stand against the US alone. I expect him to be shot or jailed within the week unless he makes himself scarce. What has happened is that the US has made itself the enemy of a significant chunk of the Iraqi population. The US is not just fighting against Saddam's Ba'athists and tribal allies anymore, but against a Shiite movement with pro-democracy traits that was one of the loudest enemies of Saddam Hussein. Most Shiites don't follow Sadr, but there will be sympathy.
This action opens up a dangerous opportunity for the most prominent Shiite leader Ayatollah Sistani. If Sistani calls for war, the once-friendly Shiite areas of Iraq will no longer be safe for US forces and violence may last through the elections. However, Sistani and Sadr are enemies, and Sistani is more of a pacifist, so it's fairly unlikely that he would back Sadr up. Even so, given the danger, the US had better be kissing his ass right now.
The latest news is that Sistani told Sadr's people to back off. That's a major disaster averted.
The world's flags graded on the quality of their graphic design.
And now, we have another guest article by William. You may or may not remember his previous guest article, on the State of the Union address. Today, we have him discussing matters of spin, language choice, and the casting of environmental caltrops...
The major source for this article was this New York Times article , which requires a free login (which is in my opinion definitely worth the cost. In several years I have never received any unwanted email from the New York Times). There is much more detail there, though the thrust of the article is slightly different from what I have here. This essay is primarily motivated by my frustration in parsing the facts from the politics in statements made by the Bush Administration. Reading the referenced article, I finally realized why: it's like a blind spot. So seamlessly are inconvenient facts and conclusions filled over that one must know where one is looking to find the hole and work carefully to learn what is there. Here's the example.
History
The Clean Air Act was passed in 1970. By the end of five years, new power plants had to be built using cleaner equipment that emitted less air pollution. In a compromise to business, older plants were grandfathered and needed not install such equipment. The expectation was that facilities would update in a few years on their usual cycle and thus enter the aegis of the law at a sustainable pace of investment rather than a sudden strain.
Energy business owners avoided the law by simply patching up old plants instead of building newer, cleaner ones (as an aside, these plants, if properly designed, typically recoup construction costs in savings from energy, litigation, etc., over the site's lifetime). Not to be trifled with so, Congress passed New Source Review to patch this loophole. If a plant installed substantial new equipment or otherwise made any changes not routine maintenance, the plant would move under the aegis of the Clean Air Act.
The industry's response was to closely scrutinize the law and its executing regulations for the line between maintenance and other physical changes, avoiding installing any new equipment for as long as possible. Old plants remained dirty. Into and through the 90's, litigation increased, raising costs. Public complaints about lack of pollution-control equipment increased. Industry responded.
Watch the birdie...
The industry pointed out that New Source Review attaches a great cost to installing new equipment. Businesses seek to avoid costs. Thus, New Source Review is an obstacle to the installation of specifically, pollution-control equipment. It also dissuades power companies from updating the old equipment which is becoming increasingly creaky, and from undertaking extensive maintenance so that plants can operate at higher efficiencies.
Did you catch it?
If not, here's another shot. Early in his term, the President responded to the energy crisis in California: "If there's any environmental regulation that's preventing California from having 100 percent max output at their plants -- as I understand there may be -- then we need to relax those regulations." On September 15, 2003, the President spoke to an audience of power-plant executives and workers. He made the same argument: the regulations "undermined our goals for protecting the environment and growing the economy."
But wait. You mean the regulations intended to safeguard the environment were actually having the opposite effect, making it difficult for plants to become cleaner? That would certainly be a grave problem. Alas, idealistic laws sometime run aground on real implementation issues. Yes, says the President helpfully, since if the law didn't exist, plants could "make routine repairs and upgrades without enormous costs...". That would make them cleaner, and we should lower barriers to such investments.
Except it's exactly wrong -- the kind of black-is-white, up-is-down blithe disregard of facts that is nearly impossible to reason with because the target of your reason can't seem to see the hole, and by every instinct of human communication you start to wonder if it's really there.
The arguments are predicated on the truths that businesses seek to avoid costs, the law imposes costs on installing new equipment and upgrading old equipment, and these actions would lower pollution. Thus repealing the law or reduce its force would aid companies in acts that would lower pollution. They deliberately miss the fundamental point so cleanly - ironic, that - that the point is momentarily hard to notice.
Namely, the costs imposed on these businesses would be the costs of lowering pollution anyway. The arguments appear to work solely because the situation is already so bad that costs would be reduced more by investing above routine maintenance than by investing minimally. In other words, with or without new-source review, plants must become cleaner, and quickly. Weakening new-source review, or eliminating it, simply means the plants don't have to invest as much in technology that is as clean as it otherwise would be.
One little axiom, and there goes the whole theorem.
By the way, note the return of the original plea: new-source review was instituted because plant owners were abusing a grace period intended to let them upgrade on a more palatable timescale. They procrastinated with every loophole they could find until the consequences of their delay were about to fall on their heads, whereupon they cry that the consequences are unbearable and a responsible government would give them a more palatable timescale.
Present
Fast forward to the late 1990's. Deregulation of the power industry encourages rapid building of many new plants. So long has the Clean Air Act languished almost totally unapplied to the energy industry that building proceeds in complete disregard of new-source review permits. The E.P.A. gathers its evidence and in November 1999 takes many utility company officials to court. This litigation continues during the Presidential campaign and into the new term.
On May 16, 2001, the National Energy Policy is published and the E.P.A. is directed to review its ongoing legislation. In January 2002 the E.P.A.'s lawsuits, to a suit, are found justified by the Justice Department. The Administration abandons this tack and tries to push the Clear Skies Initiative through Congress. An obvious sop to industry, it remains unpassed today. The judicial and legislative branches having failed to respond to the Administration's desires, it was up to the executive branch to make the necessary changes internally.
In September 2002, Jeffrey Holmstead, assistant administrator of the E.P.A., supported this position by stating publically that ''we can't even say we've gotten any emissions reductions from existing sources.'' This was technically true in the specific sense, as many existing sources do not fall under the Clean Air Act. In the general sense, it is false since some sources had reduced output; in the broad sense, it was false since nationwide emissions had declined by millions of tons; in fact, in any of the senses typically considered by a listener, especially a public listener, the statement was false.
But in one sense it was technically true.
On Friday, Nov. 22 2002, at a news conference where cameras were not allowed and which in the words of a reporter seemed timed to hit the news cycle as quietly as possible, the administration announced that henceforth new-source review would take effect if a company made investments greater than a specific threshold percentage into the value of the plant to which the investment was made. This approach had been earlier reviewed and found reasonable, with a suggested cap of 0.75% of the value of a plant (which can range above a billion, whereas single pieces of equipment might cost a few million.) The actual percentage was still to be determined. On August 27, 2003, three quarters later, the percentage was announced.
It was 20%.
The rule, essentially, was unenforceable, because no one would ever activate the threshold. However, because the rule had already been published in the Federal Register, this slight addendum existed in a near vacuum. To realize the devastating effect this small announcement has on air quality enforcement, you had to realize several things:
If you realized all four of these things, you were probably either a very well-informed activist, or a member of the affected industry or agency. Like the most elegant of proofs, the entire problem had been reduced almost unrecognizeably to a single point. The Clean Air Act had been gutted. But, like the holes in the statements that had been built up to support it, the wound was almost invisible until you looked closely, at which point you realized it was gaping, and you wondered how you possibly could have missed it.
I'll close with the application of my thesis to current events. Critical evaluation of anyone's conversation with you is good. Investigation of claims made by elected officials, using publically available information they are required by law to give, is good. Staying informed about many areas of knowledge is good. But when efforts to hide the intent of elected officials are so strenuously made that extraordinary effort is necessary to understand basic intent, and in few people will combine all the qualities necessary to initially reach that understanding and communicate it to the masses, this is bad. If you've elected someone who feels the need to operate without your awareness, you've elected the wrong man.
From a CNN article I just saw right now, talking about the Blackwater Security personnel which Tang mentioned a couple posts back:
Private security firms are now the third largest international contributor of forces to the war effort in Iraq -- after the U.S. and British troops.
You read that right, ladies and gentlemen. Of the massive Coalition Of The Willing Bush has going for Iraq, the third-largest contributors are mercenaries.
I think I can leave the significance of that to the readership.
Just a short entry because frankly I don't have much to say about this:
(AP) -- President Bush's decision Tuesday to allow his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to testify publicly before the commission investigating the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks reversed earlier White House insistence that she would only appear privately.
Some previous Bush reversals in the face of criticism:
There's not much more there, but the fact that this AP article got onto CNN's webspace period Means Something. We could be turning the corner on a complacent media. Or at least on a complacent media thinking the best bottom-line is in agreeing with Bush.
We'll see.
![[archives/afj2004/macnazi.gif]](http://www.nukefreezone.net/archives/afj2004/macnazi.gif "April Fool's!")
MACNAZIS HOLD THE REINS OF POWER IN THE WEST AND BEND THE WORLD TO THEIR EVIL WILL
THE MASONIC ILLUMINATI CALL THEMSELVES THE "SCOTTISH" RITE BECAUSE THEY ARE IMPERIALIST MACNAZIS
REMEMBER THE MARTYR THOMAS HAMILTON THE RESISTANCE WILL CONTINUE
ONE SCOT
ONE BULLET
TWO SCOT
BUCK SHOT
