Well, that was different, as far as elections go.
I've been holding off on my commentary since Monday's poll for a couple of reasons. The main one was that the election was so insanely close in some ridings that recounts were necessary; the other reason is that I wanted to see how the various parties and party leaders were going to react to things.
So what do we have here? We've got a minority government - but not just any minority government.
Because of the recent redistricting, there were 308 Parliamentary seats up for grabs in this election for the House of Commons. With this count, the Liberals needed 155 or more seats to secure a majority government, which they've enjoyed in the previous three mandates since the fall of the Progressive-Conservatives in 1993. The problem is, going into the election the Liberals were hurting badly from the sponsorship mess, and as a result were expected to get at best a minority government, with the worst case being a Conservative minority or majority. In the event of a minority, the Liberals would likely buddy up to the New Democratic Party, the closest party to the Liberals ideologically, to take on legislation. This would mean two things: one, the Liberals could stand up against the potential odd counter-coalition of the Conservatives and the Bloq Quebecois, and two, the NDP could use the threat of withdrawn support to force through a number of their own social programs.
In the end, this was the seat count:
Going into this election, the Liberals expected to lose ground but were confidently predicting a majority. The Conservatives were expecting to gain a great deal, and were confidently predicting their own majority. Both parties edged towards predicting a minority later in the campaign as they eroded their public support.
What ended up happening was that the Liberals lost many seats and ended up getting handed a big minority government. The Conservatives, however, stayed under the hundred-seat barrier, were mauled badly in Atlantic Canada, and failed to break into Ontario. In this effect, the election was a devastating defeat for both major parties, something each leader has acknowledged. Martin, still the prime minister, noted that the election was a time for voters to "pass judgement," and interpreted the election not as a mandate but as a rebuke and cautious permission to continue to exist. Harper spun his results as a victory - hell, the man's post-election speech made it sound like he thought he got a majority - but he's currently making noises about stepping down as Conservative leader to fall on his sword over the whole thing.
So both parties got smoked, and we're left with a minority government that's probably Liberal-NDP versus Conservative-BQ. But what do we have here? 135 plus 19 equals 154, or exactly 50% of the House of Commons. Not only do we have a minority government, but the coalition is a minority.
The picture for the other parties and smaller players is pretty surprising. Strategic voting showed its head quite a bit in this campaign, particularly for the NDP. Towards election day, people were increasingly convinced a Liberal minority would be the result, and undecided voters began to swing left to try and create an NDP-based counterbalance to the government. Traditionally, the New Democrats have served well in that role, both as a voice of opposition and as someone for the Liberals to pass off popular but controversial programs onto. ("Blame them!" "Blame us!") As a result, the NDP's support took a significant jump: their popular vote increased by roughly a million of the 13.5 million citizens who voted in this election, and their seats jumped from 12 to 19, almost making good their losses from the 2000 campaign.
Meanwhile, the BQ took people by surprise and essentially swallowed rural Quebec whole. Increasing their seat count by 50%, the Bloq is more powerful than it's ever been, and in a position to exert quite a bit of influence on things. The BQ is a social-democratic party like the NDP, though their sovereignty platform towards Quebec and language issues puts them very much at odds with the Liberals. And, of course, as French-speaking, socialist, seperatist, eastern, largely-Catholic politicians, the BQ is largely an affront to the existence of the Conservatives, who are their opposite in just about every way. However, the two are alike in one way: they both want a weaker federal government, and as a result there is going to be an extremely uncomfortable coalition working together against the Liberals. The fact that the Conservative-BQ coalition totals 153 seats - the one independent is one of the many refugees from the Alliance-PC merger who isn't fond of his former party - shows that not only do we have a minority government and a minority coalition, but even the opposition can't put together enough support to guarantee a topling.
What's a result of this? Essentially, Paul Martin is still the Prime Minister. (This is also the first time since 1908 that a party was handed four consecutive mandates.) However, all three other parties - and the independent - have enormous, government-destroying amounts of power and influence to threaten with. If the Conservatives and BQ close ranks and two MPs from the other side ally with them - or simply aren't in Commons that day - it would be possible to bring down the government. Alternately, the NDP could threaten to hold out its own support of Martin's party in exchange for some political goodies, also leaving the threat open. As well, something odd could happen like the BQ caucusing with the Liberals, which would be devastating for the Conservatives. In the middle of it all, there's one independent of a not-quite-ambiguous position, able to force or break a tie.
For all practical purposes, Canada has something between two and five prime ministers right now, depending on the mood of the Parliament. Augh.
So what's going to happen with all this? We're going to see a pretty shakey government, unless some lucky byelections give the Liberals or NDP one or more seats in the next few months. We're going to see some pretty rigid party discipline on the part of the Liberals, and probably the NDP, for any even vaguely-important bills, and a lot of tussling with confidence measures like national budgets. The Conservatives and BQ are going to buddy up against the Liberals, which will form one of the most uncomfortable alliances in Canadian political history, unless the BQ allies with the Liberals on some issues.
The NDP is going to be putting a lot of support behind the Liberals - in exchange for favors. Most of these favors will be of the type which will be amenable to the Bloq Quebecois' more liberal policies, most likely, so chances are the NDP is going to have a fairly easy time getting their own policies across - far moreso than the Liberals will.
The Conservatives' call for free votes on everything might as well be forgotten now. In the interest of trying to weaken the Liberals more, they're going to have to either pull out all the stops or act even more divided and ambiguous than they had during the election. This will make the Liberals look strong, the Conservatives weak, and more than likely bounce the Liberals back to a majority government in the next election.
There will probably be a lower-than-usual amount of Controversial Party Positions this election; the Liberals will be worried about having something go wrong and backfire against them later on. There'll probably be a slightly more leftward than usual tilt to things, though; expect Parliament to finally form a formal opinion on the gay marriage issue (for), marijuana and other soft drugs (pro-decriminalization or legalization), and probably some semi-sticky issues on subjects like genetic engineering (where the stance will be vaguely Green or NDP in standing). Constitutional issues and major regional policies probably won't show up, although I could be surprised.
The next election will happen in the next year to eighteen months - you've heard it here first as I call December 2005. It will happen for one of two reasons: either the Consevatives and their allies (or a rebelling NDP, or a backbencher Liberal revolt, or someone being out of town on a major vote) will defeat the Liberals on a confidence vote, forcing an election which will probably lead to a Conservative minority or majority, or the Liberals will pull a Chretien 2000 and call an election at a moment of major Conservative weakness, rebounding to their fifth mandate as a majority.
Some other interesting things about this election:
That's that for now. Appropriately enough, I'm off to Canada Day debauch - uh, celebrations for the bulk of July 1. Should I survive, I'll be back posting tomorrow or the day after. If not, of course, you are all required to avenge my death.
Many in the media are trying to position the upcoming documentary film America's Heart and Soul as a counterweight to Fahrenheit 9/11. I had written a couple paragraphs on how ridiculous this position is before finding out that the same public-relations firm trying to get F9/11 banned is promoting AH&S as an antidote to F9/11 and that Disney invited the group Move America Forward, formed in response to Moore's movie, to an early private showing of AH&S. This totally validates what the earlier draft had called Michael Moore's paranoid ranting about "Disney joining forces with the right-wing kooks who have come together to attempt to censor Fahrenheit 9/11".
There appears to be nothing against Fahrenheit 9/11 in America's Heart and Soul, only in its marketing. As near as I can tell (having not seen it yet), AH&S says that there are many great things about the United States that Americans should be proud of. F9/11 says that the Bush administration is not one of them. There is no conflict between these two opinions. The only people claiming that AH&S showcases only Republican Party values are the Kaloogian extremists in the Republican Party and the mainstream media which gladly and uncritically echoes them.
The movie which comes closest to being the opposite of Fahrenheit 9/11 is DC 9/11: Time of Crisis (aka The Big Dance), the Showtime special whose script is based on the White House's official version of events specially provided to the producers. I've never seen it, but I've heard that its tenuous connection to the facts challenges the worst that anyone has had to say about F9/11.
The handover of Iraq was completed two days early, but at the pace us slackers are going, we might not notice until June 30th. ;) So, I'll throw some quick thoughts up.
First, on the execution. It's a brilliant maneuver to screw up any plans the terrorists might have, but part of me doesn't like how they allowed fear of the terrorists to change their plans. I think the good outweighs the bad here.
Secondly, on the symbolism. The new government is pointedly not flying the Almost-Israeli Crescent that their benevolent American overlords designed for them. They're not flying the pre-Saddam Iraqi flag either. Instead, they fly Saddam's flag, symbolizing the merger of Iraqi government with Islam. Expect a fundamentalist government.
Thirdly, on the obvious. Let's watch the new government seize the oil fields and give US forces a week to leave the country, and we'll see how "independent" and "sovereign" they really are.
Who do I give the kudos to? It's widely reported that Bush had to be informed that it had already happened. Who's in charge here? One rumour says Allawi, the ex-CIA Iraqi PM, is behind it.
While I'm mongering rumours, I hear but can't come close to confirming that the US is maintaining control over Iraq's oil fields and issued a last-minute pardon to all soldiers, mercenaries, and civilians for any war crimes they may have committed.
Hopefully, the new government will serve the people well enough that nobody will want to join anti-government groups. The way to fight a populist movement is to make the population detest it, or at the least, find it unnecessary. The handover is a big step in the right direction, and free elections will push the process forward (so should be held before people get disgruntled).
Via Eschaton at the last minute, we see the US jailing a man that Iraq's court system ordered freed. So much for Iraqi sovereignty. It was fun while it lasted.
1) Tomorrow at about this time I expect to be celebrating the successful orbital insertion of the Cassini-Huygens mission into Saturn orbit. So far everything seems to be going well with the probe, and the pictures takes so far have been incredible.
2) Industry and public interest is slowly but surely growing for the concept of the space elevator. We're now seeing articles about the possibility of elevators becoming a reality more than once a year, which means that somebody has decided that this needs to enter the public consciousness. In any case, the elevator project is building a slow but steady head of steam. Here's hoping that it gets somewhere.
Today, the Supreme Court of the United States did what courts are supposed to do: it reaffirmed the rule of law and took an incremental, solidly supported step toward the greater goal of equal justice for all. One headline making the rounds claims that the decisions handed down today supported President Bush's claims that the President has the power to (A) arrest and (B) hold people, (C) indefinitely (D) without charges (E) without lawyers (F) without process to challenge their state (G) outside U.S. soil and (H) and question them (I) without protection of international conventions on prisoners, (J) simply by making an executive declaration that the prisoner is an "enemy combatant." In my reading, no such decision was handed down.
Three decisions were made today; each addressed a narrow question, essentially point (F) above, regarding whether a detainee in such a state in fact does or does not have process available to challenge their detention. The Court, in all three cases, basically replied that, yes, he does, showing its understanding of the weight of its decision and the values with which it was most concerned in a statement in Hamdi: "It is during our most challenging and uncertain moments that our Nation's commitment to due process is most severely tested; and it is in those times that we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad." It is with faith in the American legal system and clear-eyed determination to elect a President who will work toward the realization of this faith that I hold the hope of a swift blow to this Administration's remaining claims of such extraordinary authority.
For your benefit, the three decisions and their areas of applicability are discussed below. The documents cited here are all available at www.abanet.org (for the briefs) and www.supremecourtus.gov (for the decisions).
Hamdi v. Rumsfeld
This case addressed one basic question:
Whether the Constitution permits Executive officials to detain an American citizen indefinitely in military custody in the United States, hold him essentially incommunicado and deny him access to counsel, with no opportunity to question the factual basis for his detention before any impartial tribunal, on the sole ground that he was seized abroad in a theater of the War on Terrorism and declared by the Executive to be an "enemy combatant."
--from "Questions Presented," page i, Brief for Petitioners, No. 03-6696, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld; available from abanet.
Note Hamdi's status. This case covers situations similar to Hamdi's: American citizens arrested abroad and held as "enemy combatants." Hamdi has not been held at Guantánamo, but rather in a military prison in the United States.
Hamdi's brief essentially argues that he claims not to be an enemy combatant, and should have the right to contest this status; and that furthermore, the courts provide an appropriate vehicle for this. The government's response essentially argues that he is an enemy combatant and because he is an enemy combatant, due to military concerns, he should not have access to the courts. Note that the government's argument rests on the contested fact.
Justices Rehnquist, O'Connor, Kennedy, Breyer, Souter, and Ginsburg agreed that a previous decision supporting the Administration's position should be overturned. Justices Scalia and Stevens dissented from the majority's reasoning but also voted for the same order to be given; Justice Thomas dissented entirely and voted to let the detention stand unchallenged.
The core argument of the majority: "due process demands that a citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant be given a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decisionmaker." (further quotes from SCOTUS decisions can be found in full context at the SCOTUS site.) In addition, "We therefore hold that a citizen-detainee seeking to challenge his classification as an enemy combatant must receive notice of the factual basis for his classification, and a fair opportunity to rebut the Government's factual assertions before a neutral decisionmaker ... at a meaningful time and in a meaningful manner."
To the question of whether the government can detain a citizen as an enemy combatant, the Court found that Congress' Authorization for the Use of Military Force provided the President with the authority to detain: "We conclude that the detention of individuals falling into the limited category we are considering [individuals who fought against the United States in Afghanistan], for the duration of the particular conflict in which they were captured, is so fundamental and accepted an incident to war as to be an exercise of the 'necessary and appropriate force' Congress has authorized the President to use." ... "There is no bar to this Nation's holding one of its own citizens as an enemy combatant." In summary, the recognition and detention of enemy combatants is permissible. Souter and Ginsburg dissent with this while concurring with the judgment in general, saying that Hamdi's detention is unauthorized under the circumstances and he should on the balance of principles be released.
But for how long? "Hamdi objects [to] the indefinite detention to which he is now subject. ... the national security underpinnings of the 'war on terror,' although crucially important, are broad and malleable. ... The prospect Hamdi raises is therefore not far-fetched. It is a clearly established principle of the law of war that detention may last no longer than active hostilities. (decision of the majority)" In short, the Court suggests that Hamdi's detention might be permissible no longer than active combat continues in Afghanistan (which could still be a long time, and admittedly leaves open the question of Americans detained as enemy combatants at home without active combat).
In summary, an American citizen detained abroad can be held as an enemy combatant, but is entitled to due process to challenge his detainment, presumably addressing points (E), (F), (I), and (J). This case does not address the further particulars regarding the nature of that confinement in duration, location, or activities. It is my hope that the process provided the detainees will do so.
Rasul v. Bush (and al Odah v. United States)
The question posed to the court in Rasul and al Odah, as based on their petition to the Supreme Court, was narrowly
whether United States courts lack jurisdiction to consider challenges to the legality of the detention of foreign nationals captured abroad in connection with hostilities and incarcerated at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba.
--from "Question Presented," page i, Petitioners' Brief on the Merits, No. 03-334, Rasul v. Bush; available from abanet.
This case addresses foreign nationals arrested as enemy combatants, and asks whether they, like Hamdi above, have recourse to any legal process to defend themselves. Rasul essentially argued that basic legal principles imply that they should. The Administration argued largely based on a previous decision, Johnson v. Eisentrager, that no such rights existed.
In a much shorter 6-3 ruling than Hamdi (Kennedy concurring, Rehnquist/Thomas/Scalia dissenting), SCOTUS held that the courts do have jurisdiction. They pointed out that Eisentrager's detainees had had a previous hearing, and the facts of their case had been aired. Now, that hearing was a military hearing, which gives tacit support to the Administration's plan to use military tribunals to try enemy combatants; but this is an indirect support and thus I hold hope that the situation is still remediable. Indeed, the Court concludes the majority opinion with "Whether and what further proceedings may become necessary after respondents make their response to the merits of petitioners' claims are matters that we need not address now." This seems to suggest that the petitioners' claims deserve such hearing, and we ourselves can work to see that the national atmosphere is conducive to such a hearing rendering proper respect to fundamental rights.
The Court also pointed out that later developments in the law had clarified and extended a gap in the law that existed at the time Eisentrager was handed down. The Court further rejected the Administration's argument that Guantánamo was somehow exempt from jurisdiction, saying "Aliens held at the base, no less than American citizens, are entitled to invoke the federal courts' authority...".
In summary, both Americans and foreign citizens must be permitted their day in court. The past is prologue, my friends; now that the question is to be asked, we must see that it is answered rightly.
Rumsfeld v. Padilla
Both the Government and Padilla spend much of their briefs arguing the details of whether Padilla's military detention is legal and the the conditions of his incarceration constitutional. A small extra piece on both briefs refers to the question of whether the district court from which the matter arose is the correct court. It is a great pity that this latter argument holds sway.
At first glance, the decision looks like Padilla needs to refile on a technicality (a lower officer than Rumsfeld to be the respondent). The majority consisted of Rehnquist, Thomas, Scalia (Thomas siding with the administration in the other two cases, and Scalia and Rehnquist with the administration in Rasul), Kennedy, and O'Connor. Another interpretation might point out that if the Court held that a different lower court had jurisdiction, it would mean that some court had jurisdiction; however, this question is avoided with preference to the question of Rumsfeld's replacement.
Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer dissented to this decision and pointed out that the Administration played time games with filing deadlines, hence the technicality should be overlooked: "The departure from the time-honored practice of giving one's adversary fair notice of an intent to present an important motion to the court justifies treating the habeas application as the functional equivalent of one filed two days earlier." However, a dissent not having the force of precedent, this stands merely as (to my mind) yet another example of the disrespect this Administration has for the principles that underly our system of laws.
In final note, I find today's decision heartening. There were flaws, but the fundamental position taken was that detainees have the right to challenge their detainment. I'll take that ground and get ready to fight for more.
First of all, and all the comment spammers that read this blog regularly might want to note this, I've closed off all comments threads before the end of March. And every couple of weeks, I'm going to come through and close out comment threads so that we're maintaining a 90 to 120 day rolling window on when comments are open. At least until I figure out how to cron a perl script to do it automatically and keep us closer to that 90 day feature.
[UPDATE: Err. jrenken and I were trying to figure out how to implement cron jobs and managed to break something. Comments are going to be a bit wonky over the next few days as we try to fix it. In the mean time, I think I'm going to try to open comments by hands on the last two weeks worth of entry. And trackbacks are busted too...whee! We're fixing it.]
[UPDATE #2: Well, we got ourselves back to where we were at the beginning of the night, which means that I'll just be running the script by hand. Ah well.]
Second of all, I'd like to welcome JesseLMan and William to the Zone, upping our total of bloggers that hang around here on a somewhat regular basis to seven. (Yes, I know, they've both been around for a bit, but I was slacking on administrative business.)
Third, I plan to dig out an old mail from Kieran (whom I never properly thanked -- hopefully he'll consider this late but sincere thanks) over at Crooked Timber and implement individual author archives, so that if, for example, you're a huge fan of our very own Fourth Man, you can find his posts without having to deal with us lesser mortals. ;) But that's a project I'm not getting into until I've had some sleep. Which is what I'm off to do now.
See you all next daycycle, citizens.
As most of the regular blog readers know, I'm a recent graduate of the School of Information Management & Systems (SIMS) at the University of California, Berkeley. And with the shiny new master's degree I earned last month comes some interest in information technology.
This was brought home when I found and was reading a rather interesting article on the changing fortunes at McDonalds (registration required). The whole article is worth a read, because McDonalds has been slumping, and they're trying to turn it around, despite the one two punch of having one CEO die from a heart attack and his replacement getting diagnosed with colon cancer.
But the part of the article that struck me as interesting, with the interest in IT that I have, was the following quote:
And Cantalupo touched on a major move he knew would shake the system. He had decided to kill one of Greenberg's pet projects, a $1 billion investment in technology.Bell recalls that he and most top managers had supported the computer project when Greenberg launched it two years earlier. He was skeptical when Cantalupo suggested killing it. But ultimately, Bell said, it was the right call.
"Given where the business had gotten to and where we needed to focus, it was time to jump off the train," he said.
Now, as somebody looking for a job in the field, I'm supposed to support IT projects wherever I see them, right? Well, that's not quite the case. Sometimes you have to step back and look at the bigger picture, and by reading the whole article, it's quite clear the bigger picture had been ignored by focusing on this IT project.
One of the big problems in the world today is that everybody assumes that computers and the Internet are the be all end all of life, and the truth is that it's not. It's a useful and somewhat important piece, yes, but sometimes there are bigger problems and going with newer and better IT doesn't always mean a faster and leaner company.
It's something that bothered me with some of my classes, this sort of one true way, and how [XML|multimedia|information strategy] will set us free. Truth is, nothing is that simple. It's a complex world and there's more than one solution.
Well, it looks like the Greens, thankfully, did not nominate Ralph Nader. They instead nominated David Cobb, a California lawyer. There was a huge split in the Green party over that.
While I'm thankful that Ralph Nader won't have that platform to damage our chances of getting rid of Bush, I did find the last two paragraphs of that article to be somewhat interesting in terms of comparing and contrasting. Maybe you can spot it too.
"This is a dark day," said Robert Nanninga, a delegate from Encinitas, Calif. "We've just nominated a white lawyer with a car salesman's smile. It might as well be a Republican. This is going to be remembered for years to come."Earlier this year, Nader was endorsed by the Reform Party, which gives him ballot access in seven states, including Florida, Colorado, and Michigan.
I'm not trying to disparage Greens, but the fact Nader's been endorsed by the *Reform* Party -- a party to the right of the Republicans -- and yet you think the lawyer from California might as well be a Republican? *sigh* And we wonder why the Greens are never taken seriously.
Don't have much for you today, but this one is a Good News story in ways that we haven't really seen in a long while.
Via Worldchanging we get this story from the New York Times about how employees of Afghanistan's Central Bank managed to protect 20,600 pieces of Bactrian gold jewelery from the Taliban:
Armed men ordered a Central Bank employee to open the vault in the Arg and brought a gold merchant from southern Afghanistan to inspect the bullion. But they knew nothing of the Bactrian gold lying just yards away, said one bank employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Then as they left at that time and the bank official locked the massive safe door, he snapped off the key in the lock, which successfully frustrated further attempts by the Taliban or anyone else to enter the vault.
A lot gets lost in war, through maliciousness or carelessness. We've seen pretty good examples of both during the Iraq debacle. Still, it's nice to know that we haven't completely managed to destroy all of our cultural heritage.
Welp, I'm back on the platform kick again. Today we're going to be talking about the platform of the New Democratic Party. Said platform is available (in PDF form) here, or here for the HTML version. In terms of the text, both are essentially identical.
Of the platforms so far, on a basic "read this without pain" level, the NDP platform is my favorite, and when I'm king of the future political platforms will have to be written according to its style. Each policy area the platform discusses is clearly laid out, with a bulleted list of specific promises, followed by one or two items in each category comparing their plans to the Liberals' performance. As a result, it's possible to quickly read and comprehend the whole thing without too much focus on buzzwords or mudslinging. Whether you like the statements in it or not, this is how this sort of document should be written. This is also one of the denser platforms I've read - the signal to noise ratio is extremely high, and as a result the sixty-six pages of this document have far more information than the similar-sized Liberal platform, or the smaller Conservative one. As a result, this look at the platform will just.. keep.. going. Skip to the bottom for my basic impressions if you value your eyes.
The first major section of the platform, "Building the Country we Want," talks about a general unified plan for improving the state of things. Making note of the resources currently available to the country - and, in a sense, implicitly saying the Liberals didn't do that poorly lately - the NDP talk about "embarking on the great project of building the country we want" (yadda yadda, you know the spiel), making comparisons with previous largescale tasks like the 19th century railroads and the 20th-century public health system. "Building" is divided in turn into six subsections: municipalities, public pensions, education, children and families, health care, and trust in the national institutions.
"In the 21st century, we can't disconnect problems," the platform begins at this point, before launching into a list of improvements to municipal Canada. These involve a number of projects and suggestions, from a national housing program to increase affordable housing to providing tax benefits to employers who provide public transit costs to their employees. Much of the focus is on affordable housing and environmental concerns, with a large focus on improving transit. From here, the platform blends into the pension and environmentalist sides of the platform more, by proposing a national retrofit program for buildings to promote energy efficiency (starting with low-income housing) and using broader representation to defend the Canada Pension Plan.
Education! As a student aiming for the teaching profession, this is obviously one of my Big Issues, although there's also the fact that I generally see it as the most important thing a government can promote anyway. For education plans, the NDP has a fairly long list of proposals, including a national tuition freeze to combat the skyrocketing university costs, crediting graduate students' loan interests against their income taxes, working to prevent the creation of for-profit universities, and improving research funding to "half the privatization of research on campus, allowing science to be examined on its merits, not vetted by the funding corporation." (I particularly like the first and last items here.) In a somewhat related topic, the platform discusses children and families, particularly the growing income gap (or poverty gap) among younger families in the country. Plans here include - much like the other parties - a large-scale national child care program in the next few years, eliminating income tax for Canadians with an income below $15,000/year, and trying to improve the aboriginal situation to something which doesn't make Third World nations look affluent.
The major issue this election - unless you're a hyperspecialized homophobe or gay-rights activist - is health care, which bounces between the NDP and Liberals to see who gets to have the most say about it most years. A great many things are proposed in this part of the platform. Some examples include a bulk-purchase program for drugs ("as Australia uses") to reduce costs, as well as outlawing several practices which delay the introduction of cheap generic medication. One interesting thing the party seems to be doing is de-emphasizing hospitals in favor of home or near-home-based care ("illnesses are treated through drugs, not hospitals") by improving coverage for outpatient or home-patient medications and implementing non-profit-based home care, citing Manitoba's model. The NDP oddly links up with the Conservatives in its support for a CDC-esque national health system in the wake of recent disease outbreaks, but shows itself as the only party to explicitly use the term "abortion" and be in favor of its legalization.
The next part of this first section discusses general damage control to the national reputation internally. There've been a lot of scandals, broken promises, and longstanding Issues with domestic goings-on for awhile, and each of the parties has their own take on these. The NDP discuss the Quebec situation by mentioning "flexible federalism," implying a devolution of powers to the provincial level and providing Quebec with an opt-out clause for federal programs. This form of federalism also talks of "respecting successful programs that may already exist in some provinces ... rather than imposing new one-size-fits-all federal programs," which strikes me as unredundant enough that it almost makes no sense in the Canadian system, but I like it. To improve the trustworthiness of the federal government, the NDP call for long-term predictable funding programs rather than situations which can come and go each fiscal year. Most interestingly, the NDP wish to recognize aboriginal right to self-governance as a primary component of modern federal politics.
A whole section of the platform - "Building the Planet we Want" - is devoted to - well, it should be obvious. Talking about major global and environmental commitments, this section is a combination of environmental and global-justice concerns with the stated goal of creating a cleaner and more egalitarian world. This takes the vaguely risky step of saying there are federal responsibilities to the entire planet, although even the Conservatives have taken a few pieces of this plank. This area is divided into seven major sections: green energy and transportation, environmental sustainability, clean water, biodiversity, global egalitarianism and the AIDS battle.
The green plan is sweeping even by NDP standards: they pretty openly want to ditch oil, coal, and nuclear (bah!) power to segue into more renewable forms of energy. To this end, the NDP wish to establish a new Crown corporation devoted to renewable and alternative energies by establishing solar, tidal, wind and geothermal power centres across the country - when possible, located near fossil fuel centres to ease transitions. Such forms of energy would be generally subsidized, with heavy fines for polluters. Foreign ideas would be borrowed as well, particularly Alaska's growing success with alternative energy sources (the north, as the Liberals discovered, is wind-power-friendly), and so on. During such a transition, workers in the oil and coal industries would recieve assistance to help shift them into the new economy, rather than the implicit dropping-on-the-sidewalk many other renewable-energy advocates seem to like. In transportation, the aforementioned promotion of public transit shows up, as well as adopting California-style emissions standards and general tax credits on cleaner or alternative-energy vehicles. Kyoto would be heavily supported, and other air-cleaning measures would be established, particularly the idea of high-speed rail links between major urban centres like Quebec City and Windsor.
Some of the other environmental concerns are more commonsense, such as pouring money into the Sydney Tar Ponds like the other parties are promising, and proposing a ban on the export of fresh water in bulk. Funding for further cleanup efforts (and prevention of future ones) would be achieved through severely jacking up fines on polluters (ow) and requiring chemical manufacturers to "produce scientific evidence of a chemical's safety" before it can be used in the environment. On the biotech front, they support the usual initiatives such as labelling genetically-engineered food and placing a moratorium on gengineered wheat until biotech companies (Gee, I wonder who they have in mind there?) can demonstrate their safety. There's little new here to folks who know the memes.
In the area of global equality, things are once again fairly standard NDP fare. Improving international development aid to 0.7% of GDP, cancelling debts to some developing countries, promoting leapfrogging developing nations to sustainable energy and striking down NAFTA and the WTO are major planks. As well, funding to the Global Fund for AIDS relief would be tripled(!), and access to generic drugs would be improved. Strikingly, the platform pretty much already recognizes Palestinian independence.
Our next major chunka NDP platform, "Respecting Who We Are," is a general freedom-and-equality system, espousing the standard F&E values: women's equality, rights of aboriginal peoples, multiculturalism and equality, and so on, accompanied by a proposal for democratic reforms. The first four of these blur into one another, as well as into most of the first section of the platform. Pay equity laws and more stable maternity benefits are the main points for women, combined with much of the health platform. For aboriginals, an extensive list shows up, including supporting the training of thousands in the health and educational fields, settling land claims issues, prioritizing reservation land for housing improvements, and creating specifically-aboriginal seats in Parliament, citing the example of New Zealand. On the one hand, I like this idea since they deserve a voice; on the other hand, I don't like the precedent of specialized Commons seats, and it would only be a matter of time before they found themselves under the discipline of one party or another anyway.
The diversity section is primarily focused on immigration issues - "[w]ith communities in need of family doctors and our environment in need of solutions, physicians and engineers shouldn't be driving cabs. They should be helping to build the country we want." To improve the multicultural situation, the NDP would allow a rise in immigration levels to roughly 350,000/year to begin with. As well, a once-in-a-lifetime provision allowing citizens and permenant residents to sponsor one relative would be enacted, to help reuniting families. Foreign qualificiations would be more respected (this is strewn across each of the parties' views, thank goodness), and eliminating the de-facto head tax on immiogrants to Canada.
Equality is another major part of the NDP platform, and one which the NDP is actually fairly angry about for a change. Citing the increasing pressure against peaceful protests, growing anti-Semitism, and national homophobia, the NDP seem to be operating more on a backlash here than anywhere else. The main examples from this part of the platform include extending full marriage equality to same-sex couples, repealing the Anti-Terrorism Act (replacing it with legislation "that respects peaceful protest, freedom of the press and civil liberties"), and introducing legislation banning racial profiling.
The last two sections of this policy area have to do with democratic and cultural issues. The NDP's main plank here is a switch to proportional representation; I'm torn on this, because it is significantly more democratic, but it also dooms the country to minority governments. The NDP goes a step farther than the Conservatives(!) by actually wanting to abolish, rather than reform, the Senate, and also wishes - perhaps even more ambitiously - to lower the voting age to 16. On the cultural front, the NDP wish to increase funding to the CBC, provide tax credits and grants to artist and writers, and enacting strong anti-monopolist legislation by preventing media owners from having a greater than 20% market share in the national market. (I endorse this product and/or service.)
The next major section, "Protecting Who We Are," gets into some controversial territory as it discusses Canada's increasing integration with the United States. Sovereignty is the main focus of this section politically, culturally, and economically. The main sovereignty-focused planks include requiring Parliamentary consent before any troop deployments, keeping Canadian troops out of foreign command structures should Parliament not support a deployment, prioritizing the military for peacekeeping duties, and discarding agreements which permit American military to enter Canadian territory automatically during emergencies.
For economic sovereignty, the NDP wishes to renegotiate NAFTA in a way that prevents the constant US sanctions (such free trade that is) against Canadian industries, and flatly refusing to acknowledge any trade agreements which overturn democratic decisions, such as NAFTA's Chapter 11. A number of promises are given with regards to job protection too, mostly with the heavy industries such as steel and manufacturing. Most of this covers areas I don't understand well enough to comment on, although three things stuck out: regulating the amount of foreign ownership in major national industries, annual increases of the minimum wage tied to the economic growth rate, and protecting national film and television industries. Agricultural workers are going to get some protection under the NDP plan as well; a combination of protective economic laws and subsidizing of the agricultural industry will, it is hoped, maintain the current levels of agricultural workers for awhile. For those who are already unemployed for one reason or another, the EI system will get some backing up; one of the main significant suggestions here is allowing retraining to occur while recieving benefits, making it easier for people to find new work.
The last major sections in "Protecting" involve national security and the criminal justice system. The NDP theory on national security is that security is directly tied to world development; they see direct links between human rights, development and security, and much of the national policy is aimed at attacking the cause, rather than the effects, of global instability. As such, part of the security platform is aimed at development aid abroad, peacekeeping, and working towards arms reduction. The Forces are implied to get some funding increases as well, with pay raises for soldiers and acquisition of equipment which is actually younger than the country. Things like the Anti-Terrorist Act and national ID cards are vigorously opposed domestically.
On the crime front, the NDP comes right out and says that "job creation, investing in children and fighting poverty [are] the best anti-crime plan[s] available," which is pretty much right up my alley. Aside from this preventative measure and party-specific issues like marijuana decriminalization and banning assault weapons, the NDP's positions is fairly standard: a combination of preventative measures and restorative justice on one end, while coming down on serious or repeat offenders like a dynamited building on the other.
Finally, we trundle into the last section, "Clear Choices on How to Get There." The NDP are claiming that juggling fiscal freedom and national development is a zero-sum game, in which we cannot do both. This section covers consumers' rights, job creation, taxation and debt reduction.
The consumer side of this area involves creating a Consumers Bill of Rights to protect consumers - particularly those in impoverished areas - from abuse, mainly by banks and credit card companies. This involves regulating credit card rates, maintaining bank presence in poorer neighbourhoods and rural areas, a do-not-call list, and coming down on cheque-cashing companies which tend to get people trapped under 60% interest rates.
The job creation platform focuses on two main methods - supporting small business and promoting R&D to allow new fields of employment to come out. Small businesses get a hands up through a mix of tax credits or exemptions, mainly. Industry-specific assistance shows up in the platform as well - for example, a national shipbuilding policy for coastal communities. With regards to new technologies, renewable energy comes up a lot, as do plans to promote national development in general. In fact, the NDP wish to combine six infrastructure and development portfolios into a single Department of Canadian Development and Infrastructure. I'm not sure if this would be a good idea for the streamlining involved, or a bad idea for the overload on a single minister.
Next, we have taxes! Everyone who isn't voting NDP really hates their tax policies; I recently got a Conservative ad carefully designed to look like an NDP ad which crowed about taxation of the rich as though it were a horrible thing (whoops, did that slip out?). Either way, the NDP's tax platform is their most controverisal stance at any given time, so let's see what we've got. I'll make a change and look over this in a bit of detail, rather than brezing through the platform. These are by no means all the promises:
That's about half the list, but provides the general idea. I'm surprised myself, as it generally looks like a tax reduction for most things aside from corporations. Tax revenue will be increased through the increase of corporate tax, though it seems primarily through the closing of a number of tax loopholes and cancelling treaties with tax havens.
Finally, we have the NDP stance on debt reduction. This one's kinda ambivalent; they support balanced budgets and claim a passable record at same, but at the same time oppose "debt reduction for debt reduction's sake." I understand the reasoning for this; the NDP mainly wish to try to avoid increasing the thing, but at the same time don't seem in favor of making feelgood statements about reducing the debt while student loans are flying through the stratosphere. I happen to like reduced debt, but I'll live for a lack of increase, unlike the Conservatives' implicit promise to increase the debt through deficit spending. This is in fact the main plank of the debt platform - avoiding these massive spikes in the debt through large, arbitrary tax deductions, citing Ontario, British Columbia and the United States as examples. Fiscal handling would involve prioritizing infrastructure, implementing balanced budgets (barring disasters) and holding debates over what to do with unexpected surpluses, which have traditionally been dropped on the national debt.
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So, what are my overall impressions?
First of all, I have to admire the fact that this thing was put together so well. There's very little digging involved to figure out exactly what the NDP wish to do on any given issue; that's something I can respect, even for the aspects of the platform I don't necessarily agree with. The overall tone is something I approve of as well; there's an air of optimism about the whole thing, implying things are good and can be improved rather than broken and in need of repair. It's a constructive attitude which shows up even more than in the Liberal platform and vastly more than the Conservatives' pessimistic platform. There were some tactless bits to it, however, particularly the implicit refusal to recognize Bush as president of the United States throughout. However, there were some tactless bits I liked, too; I've not seen the word "abortion" show up in any other party statements in the US or Canada lately, always hiding behind euphemisms instead. As far as saying what they mean, either way, the NDP seem better at that than the other two parties. This marks them as more honest, but it also marks them as more fringe, so it will both help and harm them.
As to the substance itself, the NDP's platform is extremely ambitious. A lot of the promises - for instance, not using a national ID card or trying to strike down the Anti-Terrorism Act - are acts of legislation rather than huge fiscal concerns. Others, however, like the health and education platforms, are going to Cost. One of the main faults with the platform itself is that dollar figures rarely come up (you can view the cost-analysis document here [PDF], though I haven't had the time to look at it in detail), so we're left deciding whether to take Layton's word on it whether or not budgets can be balanced amidst these goals. These are areas where money needs to be spent, for certain, as some of the most important parts of the national structure, but I'm uncertain about the ability of the NDP to perform all this while maintaining a surplus or a balanced budget. Perhaps they can do it; the NDP have never had a chance in Ottawa, so their record is clean on that level.
I found the foreign policy section of the platform wanting in a few ways. I'm generally concerned about the state of the Forces, and while the NDP made two specific statements - replacing the Sea Kings and improving pay for enlisted personnel - there was fairly little said about other equipment, the manpower situation, and force readiness. This has become more of an issue in the past few years, and it was perhaps a bad choice to neglect this. Some other things slipped under the radar here and there, but I found specific foreign policy and national defense plans to be the main things wanting.
Overall, however, I'm impressed with the platform. It's ambitious, progressive, and optimistic, without too much in the line of attacks (one, sometimes two, per list of promises generally) and shows a grasp of some issues I'm interested in, particularly world development and new technologies - which surprised me coming from the NDP, since the left has become increasingly technophobic these days. Who'm I voting for? "Not the Conservatives" is the obvious answer, but I'm finding enough in the Liberal and NDP platforms right now that I can't quite decide which way to go.
That's my impression on this, the third of the major party platforms. I might try to get some sypnoses of the minor ones out tomorrow, but don't hold your breath as I'll be busy. Stand by for news on what actually happens on Monday's election by Tuesday, though!
Almost done the NDP platform, which'll be up tomorrow afternoon. First, however, this from the CBC.
The Conservative Party in the current elections up here has been busily endearing itself to the populace by talking about its enmity to basic constitutional freedoms for a couple of weeks now. Since Harper and Layton(!!) both tripped over their own sensibilities with the "hiding behind the Charter of Rights" incident during the debate, it's become open season on one of Canada's fundamental legal documents.
In the article, we'll see the face of the Conservative Party - not its leaders or PR flacks, but its backbenchers, who are somewhat more indicative of the type of person who will vote for the party. Conservative MP Randy White puts it succinctly:
It's time that we started to exert our responsibility as politicians in the country. If the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is going to be used as the crutch to carry forward all of the issues that social libertarians want, then there's got to be for us conservatives out there a way to put checks and balances in there.
I think that's pretty clear - we've got a member of Parliament in the Consevative Party, with more than ten years' experience as an MP, openly stating his disdain for the Charter and hoping it be weakened or repealed, or else we might have to do something evil like give gay people rights.
A lot of MPs - Conservative or otherwise - are, simply put, loonies. The backbenchers in any of the parties will occaisionally say something stupid; the Conservatives are good at infuriatingly stupid, and the NDP are masters of entertainingly stupid, etc - and so we get to see party leaders trying to perform damage control when some obscure elected member or candidate says that, say, men are intrinsically better-suited than women to leadership roles. This happens. However, Randy White is not a newbie, as a look at his extensive and frankly admirable political career shows. This is a major member of the party showing this kind of disdain for rights and freedoms.
Just another reason I'd like to see them go down in flames on Monday.
So, I went to see Michael Moore's new picture Fahrenheit 9/11 this evening.
First off I'd like to report that the theater was packed and, for a farily conservative part of the country, highly supportive of the film. A number of points got lots of applause, and there were only two points when I heard a lone voice make any sort of heckling noises. All in all a lot better than I had been expecting.
Anyway, to the film. I don't think that I have to give you a synopsis, so I'll just move on:
This film really is George Bush's movie, not Michael Moore's. Moore does the narration of course, and he does have some screen time, but for large stretches of the film Moore lets Bush and his administration do the talking, apparently on the axiom that if you give a man enough rope he'll hang himself. And Bush indeed hangs himself, or gets to the point where all he needs is a good hard shove. Case in point, Moore manages to procure a number of press conference clips from the pre-9/11 Bush Administration where all the leading lights are quoted as saying there are no WMDs of any type in Iraq. Very fascinating to see how the rhetoric whiplashed.
Moore does like juxtaposition. And it works pretty well, too. Cutting from an (apparently) al-Jazeera interview with a woman whose house had been bombed, who's screaming and crying and begging God to visit vengance on the people who Did This, to Brittany Spears' vacant face telling Americans that they should support the President... it's very unsettling. Almost zombiesque.
The film does not pull any punches. Seriously. It's not as gore-intensive as, say, Passion of the Christ, but there are some deeply unpleasant images flashed on the screen. We as Americans have really been sheltered from the brutality of this war, and seeing some of these images - happening both to Iraqis and Americans, I might add - really brings the message home.
The one punch that was pulled wasn't on the part of Michael Moore. It was on the part of Lisa Lipscomb of Flint, MI, whose first-born son was killed in Iraq. Near the end of the film, she vists Washington DC and decides to go to the White House. Exchanging some words with an anti-war protestor sitting outside, Mrs. Lipscomb is accosted by a woman who tells her not to listen to the protestor. I didn't quite catch everything the woman said, but judging by the feral snarl that went through the rest of the audience, it must've been something truly callous. I suspect that if Mrs. Lipscomb had decked that woman, there would've been a standing ovation.
Moore ends the movie with a quote from Orwell's 1984 on the nature of War, and a musing of his own. The Orwell I'll leave for others to discover; Moore's last thought (and I'm paraphrasing from memory here, so YMMV) goes something like this: "That the people from the worst parts of this country are the ones who volunteer to defend it so the better-off don't have to. What a gift they give us, and they only ask in return that we do not send them into harm's way without a very good reason."
Res ipsa loquitor.
#4 gives it **** out of ****
While reading Webcomics this morning, I happened upon a link to some very interesting information about American Express. Apparently, for at least a year, they've been calling customers with Muslim names and demanding that they provide extensive financial documentation in order to keep their accounts open. Here is the note from one customer that I found; it links to these earlier articles at City Limits, alt.muslim, and ABC News. This looks like a textbook case of unjustifiable racial profiling.
Personally, I'm not at all surprised; my experiences with them have been very negative. I used to accept American Express cards for my business, and was repeatedly sent incorrect or misrouted paperwork, often including sensitive information that was intended for other merchants. At the time I was accepting AmEx, I was also receiving a large volume of fraudulent orders, and dealt with them by asking the card issuers to verify customers' information and/or flag their accounts for fraud. About 80% of the time, AmEx representatives flatly and rudely refused to do anything at all, even to verify the customers' phone number so that I could call and warn them myself.
I strongly recommend that American Express cardholders cancel their cards and find a better company to do business with. It's been a long time since AmEx was the card of the "elite." They're obviously counting more and more on their old reputation, and less on proper or even acceptable business practices.
In an election year, it is common for candidates to shift positions on various issues, attempting to appeal to persons, usually uncommitted political moderates, who have no particular image of the candidate from their previous actions and are now paying attention to politics as the race gets underway. If this sounds like a bald statement of the obvious truth, bear with me for a moment.
The people being approached with such acts are exactly the ones candidates need to win, beyond their core constituencies, if they hope to win an election. It is vital, therefore, that those of us interested in swaying that portion of the electorate be alert for sudden changes of position which appeal to the target group and be ready to make strongly the argument that such acts, besides being cynical presumptions of voter ignorance, do not represent a stance the candidate can be reliably expected to support once the election is past.
This holds doubly true for President Bush this year; not only are the political operatives of this Administration legendary for their mastery of the tactic of false claiming moderation for extremely immoderate principles and activities (from "compassionate conservatism" to the transparent "coalition of the willing"), but a second-term President faces no future election and this President's Vice President has no stated Presidential ambitions, thus removing almost any constraints of public opinion on the office. A second-term Bush would not even have a fourth-year election for which to wear an ill-fitting costume of moderation.
An article in today's New York Times (here, registration required) gives us an early, clear indication of this tactic. The President recommended condom use in a speech on AIDS prevention, citing the three-prong "abstinence, fidelity and condoms" approach of Uganda, which has an AIDS-control program considered one of the best in Africa.
If this seems like a bald statement of the obvious truth... you haven't been listening to Bush for the last few years.
As a Presidential candidate, Bush said, "It seems to me like the contraceptive message sends a contradictory message. It tends to undermine the message of abstinence." (Richard Whitmire, Gannett News Service, Dec. 20 1999: "Many Schools Embracing Abstinence-Only Sex Education."; see also http://www.naral.org/facts/loader.cfm?url=/commonspot/security/getfile.cfm&PageID=3671, a .pdf file) Apparently at this time he thought that American teens were not quite sharp enough to grasp the intricate message that abstinence was safer than safe sex and safe sex was safer than unsafe sex.
More recently, the President's 2004 State of the Union speech (http://www.sacredchoices.org/News_Tracker/Bush_advocates_abstinence-only_education.htm) lauded abstinence-only programs, which refuse to promote condom use and are only allowed speak of contraceptives in terms of their failure rates. He put his money where his mouth was: he called for $270 million in annual funding for abstinence-only education, nearly triple the amount of his first year in office.
So, consider. Has President Bush had a change of heart? Does he now share your values in this matter? If elected, would he cease throwing money at scientifically unsupported abstinence programs and encourage a layered approach to preventing HIV transmission? An informed observer should almost certainly come to the conclusion, no, of course not. But to research and put together this article took over an hour, not an hour most observers will spend.
Indeed, it's not an hour the author can spend every time Bush makes a stunningly reasonable pronouncement. Another article just as long as this one could have been written on Bush's North Korea diplomacy, wherein the latest diplomatic overture is remarkably workable... and probably due in large part to the twin facts that surrounding Asian countries were quietly ignoring America's hard line and "beginning to negotiate a separate peace," while Senator Kerry's charge that America's security from North Korea's nukes was suffering while the Administration obsessed about Iraq "was noticed in the White House," according to a senior State Department official quoted in the article. Things a President will do while an electoral gun is held to his head will not represent future positions should he get back in to office.
This is one of the most immoderate administrations under which this country has ever had the misfortune to suffer. Whoever wins this election will need the moderates. They will need the non-wonks. They will need to convince the middle that their candidate shares the middle's important values, and they can do it either with truth or with distortion. I've come to the conclusion that Kerry can do it with truth, while Bush will have to rely on distortion. And whenever distortion exists, opportunity exists for anyone with a Web browser, a dedication to the truth, and a free hour or two.
If you hear the President say something, and think to yourself, "Gosh, that sounds uncommonly sensible of him," remember that someone else probably didn't include "uncommonly." Ask yourself whether it is likely to represent his real thinking -- something that would be expressed should he gain another term -- or if it's more likely to be a pitch for the middle. If you think it's the latter, hit Google and find out; and if you're right, let people know. Money's always nice, but legwork is an even more valuable contribution.
Newsweek journalist Michael Isikoff is currently the subject of a two-minute hate on Eschaton for reviewing Clinton's book and summoning latent Democratic ire from back when Isikoff would publish reports harmful to Clinton's image, and shortly thereafter getting some facts wrong in a review of Michael Moore's new movie, Fahrenheit 9/11.
Michael Isikoff has written too many reports too critical of the Bush administration for me to believe the line that he's a Republican partisan. His record includes:
While I don't know enough about the facts to comment on the veracity of Isikoff's reports regarding Clinton, it seems clear to me that he isn't a Republican Party shill, but he does owe Craig Unger an apology for misquoting him (unstable link).
I'm a bit more zoned than usual, so you guys are going to be a bit less Zoned than usual tonight. Just a few bits and pieces from here and there running through the news:
First off, some recent war games between the United States and India seem to have some Implications for the quality of US air superiority. I'm not enough of an afficiando of more esoteric military stuff to know for certain just how legitimate the results were - the US planes were apparently handicapped somewhat - but the implication that the USAF is challengeable is clear. This will probably spur the development of the successor aircraft like the F-22 and F-35 more than current trends already have; on the other hand, I'm not sure how much I can see them being useful yet. All of the major powers - yes, even China these days - powerful enough to put up the pretense of a fight against the US are on at least correct terms with Washington. On the one hand, sure, you're losing a war game - but on the other hand you're losing it to someone you have good enough relations to wargame with. I dunno.
In the wake of the Columbia accident, the crew of the International Space Station is being forced to take increasingly drastic measures to keep the thing from plummeting back into the atmosphere. The kind of spacewalk being planned for this goes beyond the standard "merely" difficult traditional ones into something truly outlandish and, indeed, legendary by the standards of spacewalks. Mike Fincke and Gennady Padalka are officially on the Better Than Me List, which is growing depressingly long. "This is going to be fun," Fincke says. Aiee.
As the election increasingly begins to imply a minority government after the June 28 election, discussions of a coalition government are being firmly tossed into the circular file by Prime Minister Martin. This is making one of those odder moments, where Harper accuses Martin of not being willing to compromise by forming such a coalition even as he refuses to form a coalition with any of the other parties anyway.
Don't smoke, dumbass. This has been a recording.
Blaring across a number of news services' headline is news of the abandonment of ICC immunity resolutions by the United States, which has been flinging them around for a couple of years now. There's a vague, vague threat of hamstringing peacekeeping operations more than Washington already has been, but we'll see what happens. Their abandonment of the attempt to get extraterritoriality is particularly critical at this time, when a number of US troops are fairly plainly documented taking part in war crimes in Abu Graib and Guantanamo Bay.
This one from Demagogue; the Bosnian Serb government has acknowledged responsibility for the Srebrenica massacre in the nineties. With luck, maybe the Sudanese government, which has just claimed to have ordered a forceful disarmament of the Janjaweed, be taking notes. Unless, of course, the disarmament order is a sham, which it might well be.
Or perhaps it almost certainly is, going by this interview with Physicians for Human Rights' John Heffernan, which reports attacks on the refugee columns by the Sudanese air force (unless the militias can field Antonov bombers)...
In the wake of the X-Prize competition approaching a state of having-a-winner-ness, NASA is considering prizes for further private spaceflight milestones, with the example of a $200 million(!) prize for the first private mission to actual orbit. I could live with seeing this sort of thing get more popular, at least with more outlandish goals (say, establishing a viable industry in orbit), though I'd be equally happy with NASA getting a significant budget increase...
Anyway, that's that for now. I'll try to have the NDP platform up tomorrow, and then do a multi-topic post on the weekend to get together the last ideas about the parties and my other general impressions for the Canadian election.
Well, yesterday was certainly quite the good day for some of my visions. I'm not simply talking about things like the Conservatives being down in the polls up here for change, although that's really nice too. What I'm talking about is something of rather higher importance, if you get the pun.
Of course, I'm referring to Mike Melvill's flight of Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne yesterday in and far over the Mojave. I'm not even going to bother providing links this time around, since the story's widespread enough that I could provide one for every letter in this post, and that's a whole lot of <A HREF=""> tags, so I'll space you.
So. What's the significance of all this?
Well, first we've got the obvious stuff: we've got the first civilian astronaut hitting an altitude of 330,000 feet or 100 kilometers, the internationally-accepted boundary of space. (It was funny watching Melvill and Rutan's reactions when the FAA representative presented Melvill with astronauts' wings; it was somewhat obvious that neither of them particularly have the look of folks used to heavy media attention, and it caught them totally off-guard). We've got a rough draft of a spaceplane that cost $20 million to get off the napkin and up to fifteen flights, a truly insane level of cost-effectiveness considering what's come out of it. We've also got this first civilian spaceflight project clearly being only part of Rutan's larger plan - SpaceShipOne is something only described as Tier One in that scheme.
It's that last part that gets me wondering. Rutan's implied rather strongly that the SpaceShipOne flight is merely the first step in a far larger plan:
I strongly feel that, if we are successful, our program will mark the beginning of a renaissance for manned space flight. This might even be similar to that wonderful time period between 1908 and 1912 when the world went from a total of ten airplane pilots to hundreds of airplane types and thousands of pilots in 39 countries. We need affordable space travel to inspire our youth, to let them know that they can experience their dreams, can set significant goals and be in a position to lead all of us to future progress in exploration, discovery and fun.
One of the main things I'm hoping Rutan and company manage to accomplish is at least start killing the black cynicism that's lain over anything to do with spaceflight for pretty much my entire lifetime. There's a combination of pessimism and disdain for anything complex, largescale or risky these days; ten years ago, the idea of a privately-designed and launched suborbital craft would be dismissed as mere science-fiction (as though comparing something to speculative writing disproved it). Hell, ten years ago SpaceShipOne would be contraband, as private space launches were forbidden under American law until shortly before the X-Prize was announced. A whole lot of other things were impossible ten years ago and common now, on the other hand.
I'm finding myself hoping this means a lot of the current trend of "impossible" tasks - technologies like a proper human space presence made affordable, improved applications of genetics towards better ends, molecular assemblers, and so on - will become routine in time too.
The technical world in general has given the impression of coming out of a long coma in the past three or four years. That's an unfair metaphor, of course; amazing things are being done all the time. However, there's been more of a tinge of acceptance and even hope surrounding events of the past few years. Things like yesterday's launch are the icing on a large and subtle cake, which the general public is finally starting to taste.
What could come out of this? Any number of things, from simple fare like semi-affordable tourism, to significant things like space elevators, to tremendous and ambitious things like orbital industry or even colonization, with an order of magnitude or three stripped off the bill. Pretty much all of these are absolutely necessary in the long view of things, and I could go for seeing some work on each of them in my lifetime - not just planting a flag, but doing something productive on top of it.
What will come out of this? I don't know. It depends on a great many things, such as the luck of the engineers, further incentives or support from government and corporations, and whether or not there's a backlash against all of this which results in the There Oughta Be A Law meme popping up again. Even if those tend towards drying up as is, however, we've just had some capability demonstrated. Because of Burt Rutan and his guys, we know that some steps towards great things can be done with a trivial amount of resources.
That's not good enough for me as an end goal, of course. But as far as a first step goes, it's pretty damn good.
Tomorrow or Thursday: the NDP party platform, which was downright pleasant to read.
"Terrorists are bad" is not news, but recent actions by al Qaeda and its allies exhibit an unparalleled bloodlust, shocking for their inhumanity. Despite the best efforts of Jim Inhofe et al, the terrorists continue to show that we are still better than them. I hope that such actions will only drive away their recruitment base and turn the Arab people against them. For all the technological strength of the U.S., it is the people of the Middle East who have the power to reject the terrorists, to arrest them and throw them out of their societies. It is only a matter of will.
I only caught the end of it on TV (transcripts should be out in the next few days), but Bill O'Reilly apparently called for a Jihad against U.C. Irvine. What did the University do to incur O'Reilly's wrath? Nothing at all.
Several graduating Muslim students wore sashes with the words La Ilaha Illallah, Muhammadun Rasul Allah: "There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is the messenger of Allah" This prayer is the Shahada, which is like the Muslim version of the Lord's Prayer or the Sh'ma. A few underinformed Jewish groups misinterpreted that as "Shahid" and paniced, and the panic spread. In O'Reilly's words, the sashes are "apparently signifying their support for the terrorist group Hamas and for suicide bombers in general". Part of many reports is a further misconception that green is the colour of Hamas, when it is the colour of Islam. Just see the Libyan flag. Muslim Wakeup has an article that makes sense of the whole situation.
Irvine's apparent wrongdoing was in refusing to ban the sashes without knowing what they said before remembering that the law says they'd have to allow it even if the students were wearing swastikas (not a stable link). Think long and hard about those who so quickly call for censorship. Many independent (bloggers, etc) reports echo this alert from Stand With Us, a pro-Israel group, which calls for condemnation rather than censorship. Also suckered in by the whole deal were Frontpage Magazine (twice!), World Net Daily, the Irvine Review, and the American Jewish Congress (which has a disreputable history). Googling around, I found a blogger who issued a correction, so I'll link to them for props, and Juan Cole has words on the matter. In an ironic twist, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (which has been accused of being a front for Hamas) has issued a complaint against the Jewish groups for creating an atmosphere that endangers the lives of Muslim students.
Jimmy Shubert on Comedy Central has a great routine about how one terrorist was caught with a bomb in his shoe, and now everybody has to take off their shoes at the airport:
So what happens when a terrorist hides a stick of dynamite in his ass and he gets caught? Then you'll go through security and there's a guy with a glove and a big vat of K-Y jelly...
"Have you been in control of your ass the entire time?"
"Yes, I've been in control of my ass the entire time."
"Has anyone else been packing your ass?"
"You sick son of a bitch!"
I've seen a couple of political documentaries lately, so let's write some reviews. First, "The Corporation". As a documentary, it's not the best. For instance, it places the first corporations with freedom to do anything with their money at about the Civil War, while the Manhattan Company was founded with that freedom nearer the turn of the 19th century. However, it does present a decent overview of how corporations have accumulated such powers. Where "The Corporation" does well is in clarifying specific issues. They found actual video footage of the Congressional hearings from the forgotten 1934 pro-Hitler coup, explain the IBM/Nazi connection by alleging that the punchcards the Nazis needed throughout the war were only produced by IBM plants in the United States, point out that the Akre/Wilson BGH firings involved not just the lone Florida station but were led by Fox News headquarters, and show that privatization of third-world water services includes not only the water system but also gives corporations monopoly rights on rainwater.
"The Corporation" is clearly a propaganda piece calling for more regulation on corporations, devolving at the end into a more general left-wing propaganda piece. Leftie documentaries often use the "baffle them with bullshit" tactic, splicing together microscopic clips to throw stuff at the viewer so fast you don't have time to critically analyze what's going on and can't tell if the sources actually support each other or not. Here, while there's a voiceover about people doing good and happy things (I forget the specifics), a bunch of video clips are spliced together and one is of a Greenpeace boat. What are they doing? Who knows? It had no connection to the rest of the movie, but you're supposed to pick up that Greenpeace is good without any reason why. When "The Corporation" relies more and more heavily on quotes from the love-him-or-hate-him Michael Moore, it becomes evident the producers have failed to create a film to persuade people who aren't already in line with their views. On the whole, I'll give it a mild recommendation.
Next on the list is "The Fog of War", filmmaker Errol Morris's interview with Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Since I liked this film, I'll start off with its faults. There is a lot of splicing in this film as well, but given that McNamara hasn't come out and condemned it, we might be safe to assume that Morris only cleaned up pauses and unnecessary words while keeping the original meaning. A lot of stock war footage is used out of context where it doesn't seem to make sense. Also, for being 56, Errol Morris sounds like a 20-year-old college student, which actually takes away from the film's impact. Every so often, you hear a disembodied young voice leading McNamara on, telling him to say the Vietnam war was bad and such things.
To his credit, McNamara doesn't let himself be led on, but says what he means to say, and there's where the movie is good. McNamara has a very intelligent, convincing personality and his stories hold your interest. The film doesn't center on Vietnam, though it cannot help but concentrate on such an important part of McNamara's life and career. We also hear about McNamara's experiences in World War 2 and the Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as his time at Ford. However, this isn't just a biography. "The Fog of War" is arranged around eleven guiding practical principles, many of which can apply not only to war and foreign policy but to life in general. Through McNamara's experiences, we see how these principles have been applied and how they have worked. Strongly recommended.
John McCain and Bill Clinton continue to defend Bush's handling of Iraq using an ends-justify-the-means argument to find the means morally acceptable (although Clinton shows a little concern). We have exchanged the loss of a middling dictator for the loss of one of the highest international peacekeeping principles, that national sovereignty must be respected and may only be violated in response to a similar violation, a casus belli -- or as the principle was later amended in the 20th century, in case of genocide. Even Saddam's conquest of Kuwait followed these principles as Kuwait's slant-drilling across Iraq's border constituted an invasion of Iraq. Not just we the United States lost this moral grounding, but we all humanity as no one dared use their armies to stand up to Bush, and it is clear to all that this principle no longer exists.
Civics according the the media: In addition to being Commander in Chief of the civilian populace, the President of the United States is also Prime Minister, King, and Pope. Time for a reread of Article 2.
Trouble at a small freebie paper you've probably never heard about: Weekly columnist Rory O'Connor was fired from amNewYork for chastising New York Times columnist David Brooks and pointing out that what's good for the Israelis isn't necessarily good news for the Arabs. It's not an anti-Israel column, but amNewYork publisher Russel Pergament saw it that way and refused to run it. O'Connor blew the whistle and was fired. Actually, she wasn't fired -- she was told that she had officially resigned.
Speaking of Brooks, here's an attack essay which lambasts David Brooks. I only glanced at it, but it looks interesting. The Amazon ad for one of Brooks's books is amusingly out of place.
Some of Josh Marshall's best columns are where he explains how the Bush Administration lies through its teeth while still believing they're not lying. While Marshall's on vacation for a week, others are stepping up to the job as the White House lets loose a storm of spin. The subject this time? The Sep11 commission's unequivocable conclusion that there was no cooperation between Iraq and al Qaeda, which has led the Bush Administration to equivocate furiously. The issue is Bush's spokesman's claim that Iraq and al Qaeda had contacts "going back decades". Slacktivist tears about the "going back decades" part of the phrase, while the Daily Howler takes on the meaning of "contacts". Also, Billmon dissects the White House talking points and Atrios catches Condoleezza Rice lying about what the commission said.
A few years ago, there was a little 2-paragraph bit in the local paper about the ACLU suing a government-run childrens' school for having mandatory Christian prayer sessions in violation of the US Constitution. This summary, from the Associated Press, said that the ACLU did not believe schoolchildren should be allowed to privately choose to pray on their own.
That was my personal introduction to what has become a much more visible trend (to me, at least): the mainstream media spreading information that is outright false and carries a right-wing partisan agenda.
As a more recent example, Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post writes that Ashcroft's "hard-line approach to the war on terror has made him a lightning rod for criticism from civil libertarians", the implication being that civil libertarians don't want to fight back against al-Qaeda. Of course, it is Ashcroft's hard-line approach to weakening the law and violating civil rights that has civil libertarians upset, not his wanting to stop the terrorists.
The Reagan eulogies provide many fresh examples. It is customary that when a powerful and popular man dies, especially a twice-elected President, people will find good things to say about him. However, those seeking deification of the man have concocted false and disputable memes which have now spread into the popular unconciousness and become generally accepted by those not paying attention: that he was the most popular President of recent times, when Johnson, Bush Sr., and Clinton had higher average approval ratings and Nixon had won in '72 by a larger margin (60%-37%) than Reagan beat Mondale with (58%-40%); that he cut spending when he didn't; that he cut the size of government when he didn't; that he ended the welfare state when he didn't; that Reagan's economy had the longest period of expansion in US history when it was the third longest after the Bush/Clinton and Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon expansions; and many more.
CNN, the ultraconservative news outlet derided as "liberal" by its even more right-wing competitor Fox News (a single hour of which would produce more examples than are in this post, so I'm not bothering with it), is far from immune, as CNN's history of working with Army Psy-ops to promote the US government's views would suggest. More recently, Kelli Arena proposed that "al Qaeda believes it has a better chance of winning in Iraq if John Kerry is in the White House". And if al Qaeda is Iraq, guess who CNN says we are fighting in the War on Terror? According to a CNN Headline News report run the Saturday before last (June 5th), the United States and France are "opponents in the War on Terror". I had trouble believing they'd said this, but I caught a repeat of the segment to confirm it. CNN has also hired Republican propagandist Dinesh D'Souza as a news analyst, a man who built his career on blaming blacks for any racism against them and denying that slavery was bad for blacks.
How about the New York Times, popularly seen as the voice of the Democratic Party to oppose the Republican-tilted Wall Street Journal and New York Post? The Times's reports on John Kerry are all about how he can't possibily win, appearing like an attempt to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of Kerry's electoral failure. They did the same thing to Al Gore in 2000, and it worked. The NYT under Howell Raines was part of the crusade to bring down Bill Clinton [PDF link], and of course, they are the home of the Judith Miller scandal.
When Al Gore spoke on how honour must be earned and how Bush, in his opinion, hasn't earned it, the media rushed to distort the message of Gore's speech. Ben Brackley's post in the Eschaton comments section dissects this (slightly edited for appearance):
Al Gore's speech has been the worst covered event of the week. It provides a Rosarch test for the media enabling them to read into it whatever they want regardless of what Gore actually said.
Andrea Mitchell tells us that Gore said things he never said.
Gwen Ifill tells us that "Al Gore staked out the far left position" in his speech.
Juan Williams says Gore's speech demonstrated he is a "loose cannon." (click Day to Day audio)
- Explanations:
- The media couldn't be troubled to learn what the winning popular vote candidate in the last election actually said.
- The media believes it can dump on Gore with impunity because they perceive he doesn't have power enough to challenge them.
- Dumping on Gore and his speech provides an easy way to look like they are "fair and balanced" journalists.
- Gore's prescience on the Iraq war embarasses the media and reminds them of their own failings and what might have been if they had done their job in 2000.
- They want to kill any future political aspirations of Gore and don't even want Gore to emerge as a respected and influential senior statesman (at present, this country certainly has a dearth of them).
With a cowed and complicit mainstream media, we sometimes find ourselves relying on the right-wing media, generally considered safely in the Republican Party's pocket, to speak up for the truth when the mainstream will not for fear of being charged with liberal bias. It took the Wall Street Journal to refer to the US military's torture of prisoners as "torture" rather than "abuse", and the Washington Times to refer to the "March for Womens' Lives" protesters as "pro-abortion rights" instead of the meaningless "pro-choice" or slanderous "pro-abortion".
Obviously, we can't rely on the right wing media to be their own party's watchdog, but there are other groups which keep an eye on things. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has tracked bias in the media for over a decade, though it sometimes shows a leftist bias of its own. The Daily Howler weblog has also been at it for years, finding something in the media to be outraged about every day, as the name suggests. Media Matters for America is a new group with an anti-Republican slant led by David Brock. Spinsanity is a fairly evenhanded group that has done well, though I disagree with some of their analyses from time to time.
Be warned: right-wing partisans have set up false "media analysis" organizations such as Accuracy in Media and the Media Research Center to push right-wing propaganda. These groups are part of the problem, not the solution. The MRC, for instance, is the Conservative News Service (later renamed to Cybercast News Service so Fox News et al could refer to them as an unbiased mainstream news source), an organization founded upon bias and propaganda, while AIM has a history of right-wing activism unrelated to media and is funded by Scaife and a bevy of Big Business names.
It must be noted that there is also left-wing bias in the media, though it is not nearly so pervasive as right-wing bias. Frank Eltman of the Associated Press, writing about illegal immigrants specifically (not immigrants in general) in yesterday's morning paper, says "They're the ones subjected to derision or worse, because of their skin color, language, or some perceived notion that they've come to take jobs away". Although he is writing about a film which draws attention to the racial and cultural derision faced by illegal Latino immigrants (and many Latino Americans), there are real and legitimate concerns about the social stresses of an influx of impoverished people and the weakening of the labor force by the addition of people who are not legally allowed to work, not just "some perceived notion".
What can be done about the media? Some wait and hope for some fairy godmother to appear and create a perfect, unbiased, ideal news source. In the case of Air America, a shamelessly biased left-wing media source was created instead. Some, seeing how the BBC works and how PBS used to work until it needed to be supported by advertisements, call for more government-run media, but you can look at the Chinese, Iranian, and old Soviet media for counterexamples. Some people take to trusting foreign news sources like the BBC, Al Jazeera, and Agence France Presse, or even trusting random people on the internet for their news. Getting your news from a multitude of sources is a good idea, but you have to measure the trustworthiness of your sources and be sure they're not all reading from the same script. In times like this, I recall my grandmother's cynical advice: don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you see.
Just something of a quickie, because I'll be heading out the door for the afternoon here in a bit. This, from CNN:
W. Africa to create 'rapid response force'
ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) -- West African defense chiefs have agreed to create a 6,500-strong standby multinational force charged with responding to "crisis and threats to peace" in the civil war-ravaged region.The core of the force will be 1,500 "highly trained and equipped" rapid response troops along with 3,500 backups; the remaining 1,500 will form a reserve, the Economic Community of West African States said in a statement late Friday.
Now as far as regional stabilization goes, I like hearing about this sort of thing. It's sounding more and more like the larger-scale plans, like the African Union planning a fairly large force to intervene in situations like the Rwandan or Darfur debacles, have fallen through over time. I'm wondering if this could be the start of a trend towards smaller coalitions of countries getting intervention forces put together in their own regions.
It's a pity the cost these things seem to come by, though. The creation of these forces is a sign of a growing resentment of the current situation in the United Nations, where any humanitarian situation which doesn't directly impact the interests of a major power is not just irrelevant, but something to be actively ignored lest someone go in to try and fix it. As a result, serious attempts at ending things like the Rwandan genocide were hamstrung by the Security Council.
On the other hand, I wonder how much leeway such forces would have. Intervention by foreign troops to cope with things like natural disasters or peacekeeping purposes are one thing. Intervening to forcibly prevent acts of genocide or otherwise bring an end to major conflicts will be more a matter of national resolves.
In West Africa, a lot of the countries are certainly more into intervention, having had some at least mildly positive experiences at the hands of the UN while also being fed up with the past several years' worth of instability. But in other parts of the world, where we see governments denying there is even a problem in their territory, a more forcible intervention carries the risk of blowing open into a full-scale war. That brings up the question of whether it's worth it to actually throw the W-word around in situations like this. I'm inclined to think it is; rampaging militias tend to back down after "stop or we'll shoot" is backed up with the breaking of heads, especially in the light of the greater costs of inaction. On the other hand, few people these days seem to be able to come out and say that.
On June 15, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to abandon the World Baptist Alliance, a union of over 200 Baptist denominations that had been founded in large part by the Southern Baptists almost 100 years ago. The Southern Baptists claim that the World Baptist Alliance is failing to take their theology seriously and is even "anti-American". Is there any backing to their allegations, or are the Southern Baptists just being a bunch of dips?
Unfortunately for the SBC, it looks like the latter. The real reason for the withdrawal, according to many analysts, is the WBA's acceptance of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a group that splintered off from the Southern Baptist Convention after the SBC elected leaders who had vehemently denounced any Baptists with two brain cells to rub together. As the SBC's head of ethics, Richard Land, said, "liberalism and higher critical thinking was a cancer" before they forced the old SBC leadership out to form the CBF. The WBA's mere consideration of the CBF led the SBC to cut their contributions by 30%, and the approval of the CBF led to the SBC's withdrawal. The Southern Baptist Convention's actions look less about religious principles than pure spite.
Some of the highlights, in no particular order:
* It should not come as a surprise to anybody reading the report that, the Aldridge panel comprised mainly of private-industry experts and commissioned by this most privitization-happy of Presidents, that the Aldridge commission suggest that privitizing much of NASA's organization is indeed the way to go.
* The report's findings and recommendations are maddingly vague for the scope of these plans. No real mention of tehcnical possibilities other than "NASA should study shuttle-derived heavy lift vehicles" or "NASA should study in-situ resource use" without noting that NASA has already studied these concepts, and that for the most part the studies were abandonded due to cost issues.
* Note carefully that all of the endpoint goals for Mr. Bush's space agenda are well past any likely date for him being in office. The moon no later than 2020, Mars no later than 2030... assuming Mr. Bush wins reelection this year, he'll be a private citizen long before any of his goals are met. Unlike JFK, who would have been in office (had he not been killed and managed to win reelection in 1964) in time to see the Apollo 8 mission - not the full completion of his goal, but the last major step before the One Small Step. A good rule of thumb is: If a politican says something and doesn't set a goal before his time of responsibilities comes to an end, then it's probably not going to happen.
* The Space Exploration Steering Council: Creating a permanent direct connection to the executive branch seems like a good idea, but it begs the question why NASA, if it's so incredibly important to the national wellbeing, isn't afforded a Cabinet-level posting? Or why isn't NASA redefined as a Cabinet department, along the lines of the Department of Defense, Health and Human Services, etc.? These are viable options, but it doesn't seem to be addressed by the Aldridge Commission.
* Prizes: Aldridge Report puts emphasis on prizes, citing the X-Prize and the Orteig Prize as examples of successful generators of competition. It does not cite, at least on initial reading, contests which involve a larger non-one-time prize (the $10M for the X-Prize or the $25K for the Orteig in 1927), like the competitions imposed by the USPS in the 1910s and 1920s for airmail contracts. Those contests created a) a suitable goal for industry to meet - a steady contract for vehicles instead of a one-off money cup - and b) provided the losers with hardware to sell elsewhere (mail carriers became the first cargo carriers, and in turn became the first passenger carriers).
* CATS and Industry: Industry is here, but CATS isn't, and that's a big problem. Mr. Bush doesn't seem to grasp that cheap bulk transport is part and parcel of industry - you didn't see many factories out in places like Colorado or Utah or Texas before there were reliable roads and rail traffic, after all. Industry can provide transport now, but it isn't cheap or bulk. The Aldridge Report fails to address the question of getting the cost-per-pound for orbital travel down, and that must be addressed before any large or medium-scale industry can be performed in low orbit or elsewhere.
* The report emphasizes a "go as you pay" approach to space exploration. This looks like a pretty neat little sinkhole for NASA as an organization - NASA must keep their activities sustainable under whatever budget they're working on, but if that budget isn't increased or is cut, they'll have to cut back in order to manage it, thus producing less Buck Rogers per buck, thus giving the administration in power more impetus to cut the budget further or privitize another chunk of the program. The soft bigotry of low expectations indeed. I'm not sure what's more offensive - the smug sincerity behind this, or the cowardly inability to just come out and privitize the whole goddamn thing.
* FFRDCs: The report recommends that NASA's field centers be "modernized" by outsourcing them as federally-funded research and development centers (FFRDCs), but doesn't suggest any methods (beyond "selected through open competition") for making this transition. This is fairly common through the report, as I've already noted. The Commission takes special note that one of the most famous parts of the NASA organization, the Jet Propulaion Laboratory, is actually a FFRDC run by CalTech. However, the report fails to take into account that JPL a) existed for a good long period before NASA, and b) was built as a FFRDC group and not retrofit from an existing government operation. This retrofitting will - not may, will - pose difficulties that the Commission failed to address in their report.
* The Commission also cites the DoD Cost Analysis Improvement Group (CAIG) as an example of what NASA needs. Perhaps; an accurate method of obtaining cost outlays would be useful overall. However, the CAIG doesn't have any actual authority to stop or slow or otherwise end programs if they overrun. Seems to be missing a level of accountability.
* The Commission suggests that moving through Hollywood and video games would be a good way to increase public support for the space program. This isn't a bad idea in theory, but NASA has made a few bad moves in this arena in the past (these are the people who gave official sanction to Armageddon and Space Cowboys, after all) and their public-relations people aren't quite up to handling things like studios and producers. In terms of getting an "in" in Hollywood, NASA could do worse than to grab James Cameron and give him as much official sanction and technical advice as humanly possible.
* Privitization redux: Apparently the members of the Aldredge Commission didn't read the Columbia Accident Report before making their sweeping statements about privitizing NASA launch activities. The CAIB report states pretty clearly that among the failures that led to the loss of Columbia was inadequate safety and quality-control measures taken by the independent contractor responsible for Shuttle flight preparation and launch, United Space Alliance. The QC was not done, or sloppily done, in order to - surprise surprise! - cut costs and insure a larger profit for USA. This is the not sort of thing that engenders great confidence in allowing the current privitization scheme to expand.
* International cooperation in NASA is exemplified by the Commission by the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF, or F-35) program. Insofar as it's a model of international cooperation, the JSF works well enough. However, in terms of the JSF as a completed product, it may just as well have been feasable to cite the Concorde development program as a model of international cooperation - the F-35 as built has a number of problems for it's assigned role, and the rationale for that role has become more difficult to justify in a post-Cold War environment.
* Space science is given an entire chapter of the report, but the chapter doesn't go beyond saying that exploration will be enabled and enabling of science, (File under "gee, you think?") save to recommend that the National Institute of Sciences reevaluate and reorient their goals to coincide with the exploration initiative whenever possible.
Conclusions: In the past, I and the other Zoners have criticized the Bush Space Plan for being a generic knock-off of the 1989 Space Exploration Initiative, for not having any substance to go with the rhetoric, and for generally having been abandoned by Mr. Bush when public opinion did not surge in his favor upon its revelation.
With the release of the Aldridge Report, I can say that pretty much none of my criticisms have been answered, and that many of my fears have been justified. If this report is any indication, and assuming that the administration bothers to implement its recommendations, I forsee NASA undergoing a series of management restructurings that accomplish very little except to bring large chunks of the program out of the Federal accountability loop while still receiving government money.
Bush, through his commission, has not provided us with any goals that will be reached by the end of the decade. Even the primary negative goals of the program, the retirement of the Space Shuttle and International Space Station, aren't scheduled until after 2010. No timetables are even suggested in the report. There is no concrete planning for any of the report's findings and recommendations.
The end result of this report, if followed by NASA, would be a weakened agency unable to accomplish its stated goals and at the mercy of an unsympethetic Congress for further funding. Which, I suspect, might be the whole point of this exercise.
POSTSCRIPT; THE "K" FACTOR: As an addendum, Space.com forwarded a set of questions regarding national space policy to Senator Kerry to see where he stood on the question of what America should do in space. His answers were perhaps not as grandiose as the Bush speech from January, but to my mind they suggested that Mr. Kerry - or somebody in his braintrust - understood what needs to be done with NASA and space:
Kerry said that the most immediate impact of the Bush plan is that NASA's resources are being stretched "even further than they were before the Columbia tragedy," forcing NASA to make unpopular choices like canceling a space shuttle mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA is currently seeking industry proposals for servicing Hubble robotically, but space agency officials have made clear that the highest priority of such a mission is attaching a module to Hubble that can be used to guide the space telescope safely into the ocean at the end of its life.
Kerry also criticized the Bush Administration for abandoning the hunt for low cost space transportation, a central goal of NASA during the 1990s.
"The most critical element of our space program should be reducing the costs and increasing the reliability of space transportation to and from low Earth orbit," Kerry wrote. "This is just one of the many critical areas lost in the Bush initiative."
Now, the Zone has already pledged alleigance to our Kerry overlords, but I think this statement has successfully reaffirmed that Kerry is in fact the right choice. Understanding that cheap access is, in the long run, more important than sticking Old Glory in the Martian soil is a rare gift for a politician.
Now we just have to get him elected.
Welp, my punishment-gluttony kicked in and I'm going after another party's platform now. Which? Well, the Conservatives', of course.
I've been sitting on this one for a couple days, being both busy with other stuff and feeling vaguely traumatized at the platforms in general. (When I'm king of the future, there shall be a word-per-pledge ratio, and yea, it shall be low.) My annoyance goes double for this specific type of platform, as it bothers my general sense of optimism and, well, civility. This evening, the English debate was held between the leaders of the Liberals, Conservatives, NDP and BQ. I noticed with not a little horror that the candidate I ended up liking most was Duceppe, who managed to stay clear of the worst of the rampant mudslinging but, well, is a traitor to the country.
In general, the thing was fairly ugly. The tone of the debate roughly matches the tone of the Conservative Party platform - a fairly pessimistic, wrathful expanse, laying out things to oppose in great detail without terribly much in the lines of positive wording. And so, without further ado, the platform. You can follow along here; like last time, I'll be going by the PDF. Also like last time, if you don't want to trudge through the whole thing just scroll to the end of the article for my overall impressions.
The overall tone of the platform has that same attack-ad tone as much of the campaign so far. The official campaign slogan of the party this time around is "Demand Better - Vote Conservative," and they jump right into it; by the time you're three sentences into the platform, the introductory letter from Stephen Harper is launching into this type of mode, and every promise in the platform is given in terms of what the Liberals did or did not do. Composed mainly of mudslinging in this way, however, the platform is a third shorter than the Liberals', weighing in at 44 pages including covers and whatnot. This platform says a lot less, and it uses fewer words to do it in, so let's see what we can find.
The first chapter, "Demand Better," is self-explanatory. Talking about accountability in detail, the platform focuses down on the (admittedly huge) financial scandals of the last few years of Liberal government, specifically the $100 million sponsorship scandal. The other major scandal is the gun registry program, originally pegged at a few million, which ballooned up to $1 billion (half what the platform claims) because of the costs of dealing with gun owners who are convinced that Canada has a Second Amendment. After describing this, they jump rather sharply into a series of promises for a "better and cleaner government" which will "change the way Ottawa works." Some of the promises include (not exhaustive):
The next few pages are spent going over these in slightly more detail - a couple of sentences of plans as opposed to one, with a prodigous mix of mud as well. One thing this section likes doing is assuming Paul Martin was the Prime Minister since 1993 - saying "Paul Martin did this" or whatnot when he was serving in Chretien's cabinet and therefore following Chretien's orders as head of government. This is a subtle spin but one that's taking effect, the fact that Martin's been in power since December 2003 alone notwithstanding.
Most of the promises in this area are in the grounds of "We want Parliament to do X, not the Prime Minister" or whatnot. I'm skeptical about these, as many things along these lines - an elected Senate, more free votes, parliamentary oversight for appointments, etc - are extremely standard promises for the opposition and have been for a few decades. They're also generally the first promises tossed once things get in, especially since not a few of them require constitutional amendments, which simply aren't going to happen in Canada.
One interesting claim the Consevatives are making is their plan to end corporate and union funding of political parties. I'd kind of like to see something like this, actually; the Liberals and Consevatives have traditionally been too buddy-buddy with businesses, and the NDP's gotten uncomfortably close to unions at times as well. As well, they have ideas for limting taxpayer support of political parties - parties recieve a subsidy based on the percentage of the popular vote they recieve, which averaged out to about $40 million in the past year. I like this idea in a way - it helps give third parties a boost in particular - but at the same time I'd like to see political parties subsisting entirely on private - really private, not corporate-disguised-as-private or company mandated - donations. The platform promises to "prohibit all corporate, union, or organization donations to political parties and candidates," but it says two paragraphs further down that they will allow individuals and organizations to support parties. I'm outta aspirin, so I'm going to the next page.
The next few sections are a pledge to convert the Canadian parliamentary system of government to an American style system. Declaring the Prime Minister's ability to call an election to be undemocratic, the Conservatives say they will switch to fixed election dates every four years "except when a government loses the confidence of the House (in which case an election would be held immediately, and the subsequent election would be four years later on the date established in the legislation). On the surface, this looks like a good idea - prime ministers like to jerk around election dates, and the Conservatives are still bruised from Chretien's hamstringing them this way in the 2000 election. On the other hand, our election campaigns would change from the five-week campaigns they are now to multi-month or even multi-year campaigns.
A few other electoral reforms are proposed as well - shifting from the current appointed to an elected Senate, and devolving party appointments from the party leader to the general electorate. The Senate plan is a common proposal for the right, calling for a change to a "triple-E Senate" for "Equal[responsible to ridings], Effective[nebulously defined by anyone] and Elected[duh]." They refer to the current appointed Senate, established in the tradition of deliberately being unaccountable to the electorate, as a "patronage body" and claim that "every major federation in the world except Canada has an elected, regionally-based upper chamber" (which is not true, but I digress). A final plan is to increase MPs' powers by eliminating party discipline, making all votes ("except the budget and main estimates") free votes, as well as giving them more power to review judiciary and Crown corporation positions. They claim the Senate reforms will not require a Constitutional amendment, which implies Harper seeks divine intervention should he form the government.
Right after this, they express disdain for the judiciary and the Charter of Rights by saying the Supreme Court should not be permitted to rule on Charter questions, specifically reaction to the Court's declaration that homosexual couples can marry because prohibiting it is unconstitutional. In effect, Harper promises to ignore Supreme Court decisions he does not agree with. Uh.
One of the euphemisms the party is using repeatedly throughout the platform is the term "spending controls." Harper went so far as to claim on the debate that the Conservatives were not planning any spending cuts at all - simply "spending controls." Mixed in with another string of attacks on the Liberals, the Conservatives claim that an average of $15,000 in taxes are being paid by every man, woman, and child in Canada (This is perhaps true, but as anyone knows wealth distribution is hardly even enough across the country for this to be a useful statistic. Providing tax burdens by income level, however, would not help the case), and imply that it's all being wasted. They propose a number of solutions to control spending and income, including
A few other things are listed, such as supporting research and development, but those came across as something of a non sequitur.
For other funding-related issues, the Conservatives wish to transfer about 30% of the federal fuel tax to the provinces for repairing infrastructure such as roads, airports, and other urban infrastructure. This, at least, is a Good Idea, although I shudder to think of Roadwork Season getting more involved than it already is.
On to spending cutscontrols! This section starts by saying that the Liberals have treated debt reduction "as an afterthought - what to do with money that [they] can't spend fast enough" after "go[ing] on year-end spending binges [to] dispense political favours rather than engage in careful planning." Now, as far as far as something that's supposed to be a campaign document goes, snarks like that are taking mudslinging fairly close to flat-out defamation. It also conflicts a bit with Harper's saying in the debates that the Conservatives would not concern themselves with the national debt this mandate. However, they say it in the platform. How they'll do it with the tax cutes, I'm not sure, but that's promised.
Under the natural-resources sector of the economy - a major concern in Canada - the Conservatives propose many things, mostly involving safety nets or expanding the free trade network. There's a few comments implying giving greater freedom to the fisheries, which concerns me since many fish stocks are dangerously low, and the current management is the only thing keeping them from a complete collapse. I do the idea of investing more in the idea of sustainable harvesting, which carries some implications of farms rather than simply wiping out huge stretches of ocean. Aquatic farms need more research anyway, as they tend to Go Wrong more spectacularly than natural fishing.
On to the next section, which is discussing health care. After getting through the mud, they show the same basic concern and plan as the Liberals - providing a roughly-similar amount of new money to health care with the main goal of reducing waiting times. For the most part, the plans are very similar at a basic level.
On health emergencies, things diverge a bit. Raising the spectre of "bio-terrorism in a post-September 11 world," the platform jumps into handling the Liberals' response to the SARS outbreak, claiming "the federal response was limited to handing out pink cards at the airport" when the city of Toronto was basically deactivated during the wake of the epidemic. The specific plans include defining federal and provincial responsibilities during health crises and creating a national public health agency. I endorse these products and/or services; the latter is just common sense, and the former is useful in a country where a lot of issues wind up as hot-potatoes tossed from Ottawa to the provincial capitals and back again.
Out of health - which is covered pretty briefly even if they do largely gel with Liberal plans - we go into community programs. In this area some matters of relevance finally show up to lower-income Canadians, including attempts at reducing financial barriers to post-secondary education (the Tories in Nova Scotia have largely opposed this sort of thing for several years), the implication of controls of insurance, utility and gas prices, tax credits to home caretakers, facilitating immigration credentials(!), and so on. Some specifics of these plans involve improving the Canada Student Loans Program (which is nightmarish!), eliminating any taxes on gasoline if prices rise above $0.85/litre (they're at $0.938 here, now), and double the size of home caregivers' tax credits to $7,000. Immigration reforms aren't specified, only promised. On the aboriginal situation, the Conservatives of course (justifiably! Even Martin agrees!) slam the Liberal policies to this point, and suggest a plan to renationalize the population in general, as well as provide funding for access to native-language schools, which is generations overdue.
Environmental policy is essentially a cut-and-paste from the Red Book - $4 billion to clean up the Sydney Tar Ponds, emissions caps on various pollutants, large fines on polluters, and promoting alternative energy with the implication of wind plants. The one difference is the Conservatives' explicitly not recognizing Kyoto, and implicitly not recognizing climate change. The rest of their environmental policy, however, I rather like.
Under improving security, the plan involves Getting Tough On Crime, scrapping the firearms registry, increasing the deportation rates and implementing a "Made in Canada foreign policy." Let's see what we've got here...
Under GTOC, plans include eliminating house arrest for violent or sexual offenders, as well as drug dealers, eliminating the concept of concurrent rather than consecutive sentences, forbidding felons from voting, and trying violent offenders above the age of fourteen as adults. Additionally, the plan is to scrap the firearms registry and shift the funding from it to law enforcement, which I like on the surface until I realize that it involves eliminating the gun registry. Canada has neither a Second Amendment nor anything like it, but much of the rural culture has grown up under the belief that we do, which creates some nastiness to say the least.
For the other type of security, the standard claim of the country becoming a Safe Haven For Criminals And Terrorists is made. Now, this is certainly a valid concern, especially in the past year or so as we've had folks rather baldly declare themselves to be al-Qaeda operatives. To this end, the Conservatives will attempt to focus on the 36,000-strong removal order backlog, "putting priority on individuals with criminal records or connections to terrorist organizations and organized crime," as well as "ensur[ing] that refugee claimants who arrive in Canada without proper documentation do not put Canadian security at risk." They don't say how they intend to do the latter, however, so I suppose we'll have to see.
A section is added for the Canada-US relationship. Harper and company wish to make the position of Canadian Ambassador to the United States a cabinet rank. This idea intrigues me, considering the importance of the relationship, and I find myself cautiously liking it. Creating a seperate Secretary of State for Canada/US relations is perhaps a bit overboard, though. Otherwise, the plan here is kind of uneven. There are mentions of vigorously defending national interests, but also the implication that the United States should not be criticised, going so far as to publich an article in the Wall Street Journal last year "officially" apologizing to the United States for Canada's refusal to participate in the war against Iraq. Considering the general tendency of the current Conservative Party to mimic the ideas and policies of the US Republican Party, especially in the past couple of years, there's an overall tone of going back south on bended knee to fix "problems" which have arisen.
Next on the list is the description of the aforementioned Made In Canada Foreign Policy. The Conservatives don't care much for the idea of a middle power, openly calling for a leadership role in world affairs and claiming that the Liberals "are the last to notice" that the world has changed. Harper's platform calls for a closer relationship with NATO and the UN to "articulate our core values" of democracy, individual freedom, capitalism, and "compassion for the less fortunate" across the world. For international development policy, they actually provide some specific (to an extent) focus areas, namely an expansion of Canada's Asia-Pacific presence and improving the African situation - specifically promising to reform patent laws to allow low-cost medication for AIDS and other epidemics, something really, really sorely needed.
Last on the platform is military reform for the Department of National Defense. At the English debate the other day, Harper repeatedly - and vaguely, but understandably - called for a better spread of capabilities and more modern equipment for the military. A problem with Canadian defense is that nobody wants to try procurement; the Liberals have hemmed and hawed over replacing the Sea Kings with helicopters which were invented after the discovery of fire, but the Conservatives have pledged to kill any Liberal replacement programs as well. This is playing politics with the lives of DND personnel, which Ain't Cool. Going into the platform itself, we've got a 10% increase in defense funding with the goal of moving to the NATO European average percentage of GDP for defense budgets, as well as an increase of Regular Force strength to 80,000 - from the roughly 60-65,000 that it is. For actual equipment, upgrading the national fighter arm, providing heavy-lift aircraft, replacing the Sea Kings (hah!) and designing or procuring main battle tanks are listed as major priorities. Additional proposals include a significant upgrade of the navy, procuring new destroyers, as well as helicopter carriers (is that a plural I see?) for strategic airlift. Considering Canada's current role and capabilities in the world, I could park myself behind every one of these proposals, although I'm not sure how an extra $1.2 billion of funding could support this, or even the $3 billion the Liberals are proposing, particularly since new Canadian gear in the navy is typically rather, ah, advanced and therefore up there in price tag terms.
-----
This platform leaves me with mixed feelings in a few places. Some of the proposals, including the general health platform and defense policy, meet with a significant amount of approval from me. However, there are a lot of issues I don't like with it. The general tone of the platform is the first thing; it campaigns on hostility, on a "vote us because they're bad" platform, rather than propping up proposals on their own merits as the Liberals and (as we'll largely find with the next post) the NDP both tend to do. The priorities are striking as well - roughly half the 44 pages of the platform are devoted, essentially, to taxation issues, with a very powerful tone of supply-side economics throughout. I don't like how those worked out under Mulroney (or his American equivalents past and present) and wouldn't like them again. Additionally, Conservative support for privatizing health care worries me as well, as does their rather callous disregard for the Constitution, both in terms of traditions and of rights and law.
The tone of the platform overall is a fairly pessimistic one. It's almost impossible to read a paragraph of the platform which doesn't include the phrase "Paul Martin and the Liberals...", and the platform is comparatively short. As a result, when you strip out the attacks, there really isn't much to say in a lot of the sections. In the sections where there are things to say - particularly the community and justice sections - the tone is that the system is broken and needs to be repaired, versus the other parties' tones that the system is working alright and needs to be improved. Other sections, especially with regard to the Consevatives' plans for the economy, are rather the opposite - forecasts which are optimsitic, perhaps even idealistic.
When it gets down to the almighty loonie, the platform is a combination of massive tax cuts and significant spending increases, particularly in the areas of health and defense (I refuse to believe the defense promises can be accomplished without getting much more funding than they have). It's less than prudent to say the least, particularly while the country's still paying off Mulroney's long fiscal grand mal.
That's that for the Consevatives, anyway. (If my bias hasn't shown through, I'm voting for someone else.) My apologies for this one taking so long, as that awful thing called the Real World reared its hideous, misshapen head and called me away for stuff. Next, however, are the New Democrats' platform, which promises to be entertaining in a number of ways.
You'll have to count me out. I don't have a single red item in my wardrobe, and I rarely go out on Fridays anyway. Maybe I can reinstall Red Hat every week.
Articles here, here, and here. Important stuff to take out of it:
This comes from the "independent" National Commission on Terrorist Acts Against the United States, actually a bipartisan committee of five members appointed by Congressional Republicans, five by Congressional Democrats (including one appointee who joined a law firm that represents Saudi defendants of lawsuits regarding Sep11), and a head appointed by Bush.
More to come in the next few days, I expect.
Noting that the Catholic Church has taken strong positions on more than abortion, Senator Dick Durbin analyzed 48 recent Senate votes on 24 issues important to the Catholic church. Guess who, according to Durbin, is the Catholic Senator most likely to follow the Vatican's teachings? John Kerry, with a high grade of 60.9%. By the votes selected, Durbin himself comes in second place, followed by Ted Kennedy, the "anti-Catholic" Patrick Leahy, and a couple other Democrats. The highest ranking Republican is Mike DeWine, in seventh place with a grade of 53.8%. The Republicans on average score 43%, the Democrats 54%.
Two things to take out of this: the Catholic Church has strong positions on many issues, and no Senator in either party sees a need to follow Vatican doctrine all the time or even most of the time.
The crowd that gave Michael Moore's controversial "Fahrenheit 9/11" a standing ovation last night at the Ziegfeld Theatre premiere certainly didn't have to be encouraged at all to show their appreciation. From liberal radio host and writer Al Franken to actor/director Tim Robbins, Moore was in his element. But once "F9/11" gets to audiences beyond screenings, it won't be dependent on celebrities for approbation. It turns out to be a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail.
A FOX News film critic just praised the work of Michael "I Hate FOX And Everything It Stands For" Moore.
Is that the four horsemen I hear in the background?
(or "Why does everyone suddenly wearing a goatee?" for the geekier readers.)
It's over, and Newdow lost. There's a good writeup in the K5 queue; it may or may not be published in the next few days. My writeup's not quite so good. I'm too pissed off.
Only the most braindead cultish moron could possibly look at the facts and find this:
- Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion (US Constitution, 1791)
- The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded upon the Christian religion (Treaty of Tripoli, 1797)
- the whole American people ... declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state (President Thomas Jefferson, letter to Danbury Baptist Association, 1802)
compatible with this:
- I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. Thou shalt have no other gods before Me. (the Ten Commandments, ~1000 BC)
- Listen, Israel: The Lord our God, The Lord is One. (Judaism's central tenet, Deuteronomy 6:4, ~1000 BC)
- From this day forward the millions of our schoolchildren will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural schoolhouse, the dedication of our Nation and our people to the Almighty. (US Senate Chaplain Frederick Harris, 1954)
Unfortunately, we have a minimum of four braindead cultish morons on the Supreme Court, needing only one ignorant fool for a majority. Less unfortunately, the sane bench realized the precarious position on which America's fragile freedoms rest and threw out the case on a technicality, leaving a ruling on the merits to a future Court.
That didn't stop William Rehnquist, Clarence Thomas, and Sandra Day O'Connor from issuing their own rulings in favour of the 1954 change to the Pledge, Rehnquist and O'Connor finding that Judaism isn't really a religion because everyone they know agrees with the basics, and Thomas finding that Congress didn't really pass the 1954 law but the States did. Antonin Scalia is on prior record agreeing with Rhenquist's position; he had recused himself from the case after taking flak for not recusing himself from the trial of his hunting buddy Dick Cheney. This just goes to show that the four of them have no business being anywhere near a gavel unless they're being impeached by Congress for their rumoured illegal gambling parties.
Personally -- I've said this before and I'll say it again -- I believe the whole concept of an official Pledge of Allegiance is un-American. The USA is a country founded upon revolution and the belief that revolution is necessary and morally correct when the government no longer respects the rights of the people. This is a country founded on the citizenry shooting their own soldiers and destroying their own government's buildings. It is not the people's duty to hold allegiance to the government, but the government's duty to hold allegiance to the people. Having an official Pledge of Allegiance which directly and clearly violates the highest laws of this country is an even greater outrage.
Here's the scenario: A major city is faced by an outbreak of a rare virus. Instead of being a chance occurence, this is a clear act of bioterrorism. Frantic to find the antidote and the persons responsible, a government agent locks himself in a room with a suspected member of the terrorist organization and proceeds to do horrible things to him until he gives up the necessary information. Armed with this knowledge, law-enforcement officials race to the rescue, saving the city from the unspeakable horrors that awaited it.
Sound familiar? It should. I've just given you a synopsis of the last season of the hit Fox show 24. It's also cited by unrepenetant warbloggers and the morally bankrupt as the "clear and present danger" under which the United States government should be allowed to torture suspected terrorists.
Yes folks, this is indeed one of the primary justifications for the abuses at Abu Ghraib, the conditions at Guantanimo Bay and the now-famous torture memo that cites the President as able to do whatever he feels like in a time of war. It's more commonly referred to as the "ticking bomb" justification - if there's a ticking bomb somewhere, that makes it all okay - and it's dragged out any time somebody voices any level of discomfort or displeasure with the idea of the US government torturing people.
Now, folks over here on the non-warblogging side of the fence have spent considerable time and energy wringing our hands over why the Abu Ghraib debacle (And let's not waste words; it is a debacle.) hasn't generated any great spike of outrage at the administration over their policies. Moreover, we're wondering why there's such a tolerance for this kind of behavior.
My main man Zibblsnrt is one of Dawkins' disciples, so he knows more about the propagation of memes than I do. However, allow me to put forth a modest proposal: When we see Kiefer Sutherland beat the mortal shit out of a terrorist on 24, this creates a powerful image in our heads. It's not desensitization, or it's not just desensitization. We're being bombarded with two messages:
1) Hurting defenseless people really badly is okay in a crisis situation,
and
2) The defenseless people who are hurt really badly deserve it, because they are Bad.
It's that last point that's the most insidious memetic poison. We don't see Hard Man Jack Bauer beat and terrorize some poor schmuck who got stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time, because the demands of a weekly continuing serial can't afford to have something like that happen. We need to make sure the good guys and the bad guys are in constant conflict. Thus in Hollywood, the authorities always manage to catch a bad guy. More, they always catch one of the few bad guys who is critical to the plot; it's never some random thug or lackey who gets caught, it's somebody who has detailed knowledge of where the bomb is.
Stuff like this caused cynical internet geeks to create the Evil Overlord List in more peaceful times. These days, it reinforces the idea that because we are at War (with an enemy which is rarely specified) and we are in Danger (from attacks that vary between the unlikely to the outright fanciful, depending on the teller of tales), it is Good and Right to inflict torture on our enemies (despite the fact that this brings us to our enemies' level) so that we do not Lose (although what we'll lose is not very well defined, either).
Is it intentional? The plotline of 24 was written down long before the Abu Ghraib debacle came to light in any meaningful manner, and the appearance of the two almost simultaneously seems to be more accident than deliberate plan. The part of the people latching onto 24 scenarios as part and parcel of the ticking bomb justification certainly are exploiting it to the hilt. As this comes in a period where the Attorney General deems it fit to go on all channels and announce incredibly vague terrorist threats to just about everything under the sun, it would not come as a huge surprise that the combination of 24 and adminstration FUD plays a big part in keeping down the outrage.
After all, if television has taught us anything, it's that the bad guys are
always bad and deserve anything the good guys do to them. As we have just planted
our first Hollywood President in the ground, that's a lesson we should remember.
Daniel Ellsberg's Secrets, beginning of chapter 19, edited for brevity:
The main story that day concerned what had become known as the Green Berets, or Special Forces, murder case in Vietnam, I had been following this story for weeks, and it had appeared on the cover of every newsmagazine. Since July the colonel in command of Special Forces in Vietnam, Robert Rheault, and five intelligence officers assigned to him had been charged with premeditated murder and conspiracy to commit murder. A sergeant and a warrant officer were being held with charges held in abayance.
...
The headline on Sell's story in the middle of the front page was MURDER CHARGES AGAINST GREEN BERETS DROPPED BY ARMY. The story read:
The Army Monday overruled its field commander in Vietnam and dismissed murder charges against eight Green Berets suspected of killing a Vietnamese double agent.
The surprise action was ordered by Secretary of the Army Stanley R. Resor, who only 11 days earlier had indicated he strongly felt the case should be brought to trial.
...
According to Resor: "I want to make it clear that the acts which were charged, but not proven, represent a fundamental violation of Army regulations, orders and principles. The Army will not and cannot condone unlawful acts of the kind alleged."
...
I lay on my bed and listened to the ocean and the gulls and thought about what I had read. One aspect of it was the outrage by Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate that American officers should ever have been put under criminal charges, risking imprisonment, just for killing a Vietnamese civilian in cold blood. And there was a sense of unfairness, of selective prosecution, in singling out these particular soldiers for a kind of killing that was "not uncommon."
Donovan's report cited statements of approval of the dismissal by many leading members of Congress. "I think this action by the secretary," said Representative George Bush, "is a correct one and should prove significant in helping the morale of our combat troops."
How much of the above have you heard during the current torture scandal? It's against regulations, but we're not holding an investigation. We shouldn't acknowledge it happened because it would hurt the morale of the troops. Congressmen who are more upset at the upset than at the act. And so on.
Not meaning to sink Will's report on Kerry's and Bush's advertising style, just finding interesting stuff to share.
Ron Reagan Jr. slaps Bush Jr. around a bit during the memorial speech for his father, former President Ronald Reagan:
Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man, but he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage. True, after he was shot and nearly killed early in his Presidency, he came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good, but he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference.
I'm surprised this wasn't all over the news this morning. Maybe people just don't go for subtlety anymore.
Also, Bush complained to the Pope that "not all the American bishops are with me" on his agenda to outlaw abortion and gay marriage (scroll down to "During his June"). Lots of world leaders ask the Pope for guidance and approval, but here it looks like Bush is giving the Pope orders. Also, as noted by religious radio talk show host Bernie Ward, Bush is asking the head of a foreign state to influence US opinion in his political favour.
[This here is another guest post from William Keith, who's written some outstanding stuff for us before. Enjoy. -kat]
In the course of examining information about the two major-party candidates in this year's American presidential race, I thought it only fair that I take a moment away from listening to various proxies and devotees talk at each other and find out what the candidates had to say on their own behalfs. I headed to each candidate's website and came across their video archives, noting with interest that these weren't, as of June 12 2004, very big; it was quite possible to consume all of their uploaded ads in one sitting. I did this(I recommend the exercise, if you have a spare hour or two), and noticed some interesting contrasts in which I thought the NFZ might be interested. (Full disclosure: I am an independent but an active supporter of the Kerry campaign.)
Basic stats: at time of writing, Kerry's video site links the most recent two videos from the front page, and clicking "Videos" gets you to the full site at http://www.johnkerry.com/videos . There he has 28 campaign ads in English and in Spanish, 11 features, and 35 videos from other settings such as news interviews. Beyond this, 10 links and 3 transcripts associated with the videos provide additional information.
Bush's campaign site links the most recent two videos from the front page, and clicking "Latest TV Ads" gets you to the full A/V site at http://www.georgewbush.com/VideoAndAudio/ . There he has 16 ads (counting together two ads each appearing in English and Spanish, and one group of an ad and two updates), 20 other videos, and 80 audio clips in both English and Spanish. Beyond this, 28 fact links and 2 transcripts associated with the videos provide additional information.
I focused my analysis on the each campaign's ads; these have a focused format that allows for easier comparison, while the feature videos are typically much longer and go into greater detail. In addition, these are more relevant to the many viewers who will see the ads on TV, and not the feature videos on the campaign sites.
The first thing that piqued my interest was the placement of approvals. As most of our readers will know, recent changes to American campaign law require that a campaign clearly state that it, or its candidate, approved a message for which it paid. Both candidates have settled on the basic formulation, "I'm [candidate], and I approved this message." President Bush almost always puts his at the top of the ad; John Kerry almost always puts his at the end. This could be chance, but as both campaigns try different placements on occasion, the choice seems conscious.
With the approval at the top of the ad, the viewer is shuffled onward to the content of the ad itself. The approval seems intended to be forgotten, a legally-required irrelevancy. One is left thinking about the Bush campaign's message. Kerry's campaign almost seems to draw attention to the approval, often adding the phrase "...because [campaign slogan]." One is left with Kerry's voice in the ears, and gets the impression that he spoke the words of the ad; the man becomes the message. Not only is the latter choice logical for someone with a lower national profile than the President (the campaign has a desire to amplify his presence as much as possible), but both of these placements are quite logical when considering the content of the ads.
The typical content of a Kerry ad is his own ideas, stances, and record; these are the main content of 12 ads, while 7 contrast both candidates' positions and 8 speak primarily about Bush's record, with six weighing in with endorsements (yes, that's more than 28; some ads have more than one style of content.) The typical content of a Bush ad is attack; 7 ads attack Kerry's positions while 4 speak to the President's own stances and 1 contains an endorsement. Also, 4 Bush ads contrast the candidates' positions, and here an interesting secondary contrast develops. When Kerry contrasts the two men, he typically focuses on his own ideas, concluding with one of his own issues; when Bush does so, the ad's narration shifts tonally and the script often ends with a slogan attacking Kerry's position.
Think about the placement of approval in this context. The Kerry campaign is striking a more positive tone and wants viewers to associate that tone with their candidate. The Bush campaign is striking a negative tone and wants viewers to associate that mood not with their candidate, but with his opponent. Such an ad isn't about Bush; it's not campaigning for him so much as it is campaigning against Kerry. (This itself is interesting considering that a frequent claim made by the Bush campaign is that Kerry is simply running as the "Anybody But Bush" candidate, without clear ideas of his own.)
Right now, it thus appears that both campaigns are revolving around Kerry. The Kerry campaign is rushing to get his ideas into the discourse; the Bush campaign is trying to obstruct this. Eventually, I think one of two things will happen. The focus will switch, beginning to focus on Bush's record once Kerry is solidly defined, with Kerry pressing the challenge and Bush being required to defend himself; or Kerry will not be so successful in this and will switch to probing the President's record as the Bush campaign continues on the attack. What a muddy campaign that would be. In either case, watch for a change in approval placements as a signal of change, though by this point in the campaign the style may have achieved brand status and thus be costly to change. (The other two apparent possibilities -- continuing status quo, or the Bush campaign going highly positive and focusing on the President's achievements while Kerry continues discussing his own -- both seem unlikely to me.)
The next contrast I notice is in the communication style of the two campaigns. In particular, the level of involvement from viewers seems drastically different.
While both campaigns display the URL of their website in the ads, the Kerry campaign does so much more prominently, occasionally making it the central feature on the screen, encouraging the viewer to go the the website and learn more about the issue Kerry is speaking of in the ad. Other ads seek volunteers and contributions; the ads try to involve the viewer and not constitute the whole package.
The Bush ads, on the other hand, press the objective of defining Kerry to the point where the message is not only contained in the ad, it can be condensed no further. Bush's ads try to peg Kerry on a single word that will stick: "wacky," "troubling", "pessimism." The ads end with John Kerry's name and the very last word is the intended message. This ad, I think, is not even intended to be remembered consciously; if you forgot that A called B "troubling" and only associated B with the word "troubling," you would be more likely to think that the feeling was your own. No conscious viewer involvement is required.
As the election dynamic grows, the characteristics noted here may change and more contrasts may appear. Stay tuned for more developments.
Time to get political on you guys. As some of you know, there is a general election being called in Canada for June 28th. With a little over two weeks to go in a five-week campaign, I figured it's time to take a good look at the party platforms. So every day, possibly every other day, for the next little bit, I'm going to do exactly that.
Today we're going to be talking about the incumbent party, the Liberals, rulled by the current Prime Minister, Paul Martin. Check the bottom of the post for my impressions, or just hit the link and we'll start talking. We will be talking about the Liberal Party for a long time.
I'll be looking at the PDF version of the party platform for this. If you want to follow along, that's here, clocking in at 58 pages and 1.2 megs. In the name of vaguely apolitical cynicism, I'm going to skim over or ignore the majority of the mission-statementy things ("We envision a Canada with safe neighbourhoods" or "families are good" - you know the sort of thing) in favor of more specific policy statements unless something really eyecatching pops up. For what it's worth, the basic MS-y things in the Liberal platform are pretty much standard - health, education and social equality are the main things stressed.
Education bounces up implicitly rather often in the platform. There are numerous references to promoting a high-tech economy - as opposed to the heavy-industry economy Canada is evolving out of, or the natural-resources economy we had before the war - and a lot of statements linking those to the university environment.
Towards the beginning of the platform there are some bitter expressions in the foreign policy plans. The platform certainly doesn't imply isolationism, calling for leading up significant reforms in the world stage and trying to create circumstances where "the international community accepts an obligation to protect people from deadly oppression by their own government" (emphasis added), citing the events in Rwanda and Bosnia, and referring to other recent affairs.
The first chapter of the actual body of the platform is describing some of the accomplishments since Paul Martin came to power for the Liberals in December. This can be taken slightly with a grain of salt, as Martin's replacing Chretien last year unelected means he's been gearing up for an election since day one, but some of the acts listed include:
There's several more, but those are the highlights which jumped right out at me. What follows is another list of general actions with municipalities (improving federal funding to cities for infrastructure), education (significant assistance to low-income families for university), the creation of a National Science Advisor position, a $1 billion increase in public health (particularly since the SARS outbreak), a similar-sized assistance package to farmers struck by American sanctions after the CFJ cases, a tremendous increase in environmental cleanup funding ($4 billion for one site - granted, that's the Sydney Tar Ponds), the establishment of a Department of Public Safety, and a few others.
A pair of foreign-policy items jump out: "the world's first legislation to make low-cost generic drugs available to combat infectious diseases (notably HIV/AIDS) in poor countries," and a series of plans to try and bolster relations with the United States, which were damaged by Chretien's not, well, doing exactly what Bush wanted all the time. The implication is that Martin wants to have more involvement in US internal politics, which I'm not sure about; this could be an on-paper slap back for Tom Ridge's attempt a couple of years ago to directly order the Canadian parliament to do exactly what he wanted them to do, though.
The next chapter of the platform discusses social policy and jumps right into health care. This is describde flat-out as the main priority: "The priorities of a Liberal government begin with publicly funded, universally available health care... Nowhere does government interact with people in a more meaningful and consequential way." To say I support this is a bit of an understatement, particularly with the Consevatives desperately trying to privatize the system. This is also a major financial aspect of the Canadian economy, with $120 billion, or roughly 10% of the GDP, being spent on it in 2003 - up from about $75 billion and 9.1% in 1995. Under the platform, health expenditures will be the single biggest aspect of funding, with plans to raise funding to $157 billion(!) by 2008; half of that new money is already being made available.
The criticism of the Canadian health care system is the wait for serious care. While I haven't encountered too much of this - and I've bounced in and out of hospitals more than I'd like - but it's an issue for things like elective surgeries, MRIs, and whatnot. "Canadians need to know how long it currently takes to get a procedure like an MRI, and how long it should take," the document says, and the Liberals are promising to implement a strategy to reduce national wait times, as well as get an idea of how long those times are relative to other parts of Canada and what they should be. The funding for this plan would be gotten by shuffling money from other parts of the national budget, and the main focuses of the wait-times reduction will be aimed for cancer and heart treatments, joint replacements, sight restoration and diagnostic imaging.
Waiting is a major problem in emergency rooms as well - at least provided one doesn't rate too high on the Triage-O-Meter. The implied plan for emergency rooms is a combination of work coming from the wait-time reduction plan and using some of the new health funds to support the training of more medical personnel - emergency room staff are currently sorely overworked. Plans for home care will get some of this as well, although it's something of a niche, as well as reducing the (already decently low, but what the hell) cost of prescription drugs and providing tax breaks for family caregivers - those dealing with relatives with debilitating illnesses and the like.
A final health-related plan is dealing with pensions for the elderly. Such pensions are adjusted quarterly to keep up with inflation, but wage growth have been exceeding inflation in Canada for some time. The plan here is vague, but it seems to be planning to bring pensions in line based off wages as much as inflation, to ensure that spending power remains constant.
The next segment of the policy named is that of aboriginal policy, which is frankly the national shame of this country. Policy towards the natives has been a mix of condescending, neglectful, and consciously genocidal - I use that word deliberately - for much of the past century. Flat-out saying that "the quick fixes have all been tried" and the the aboriginal story is one "of promise untapped and promises unfulfilled" - very strong words, considering most of the Canadian governments of the past fifty years were Liberal! - the Liberals announce an intent to try and bring qualify of life for the aboriginals up to the standards of the rest of the population over the next five years. I'm skeptical about this - that's a tight timetable for a tremendous impact - and there fairly little concrete in here. We'll see how it goes.
The next few pages cover a few more plans for getting houses in order, such as a pledge to build a national child-care program. This would be explicitly modelled on European systems, such as those of France and Denmark, and saying how the Canadian system (and the American one, the platform adds very unnecessarily) are nowhere near so progressive. The plan appears to be to take Quebec's child-care system, which is both affordable and high-quality, and extend that across the country. The plans for such a national system would phase in $5 billion over the course of the mandate.
On to municipal development. In a particularly gutsy move in an increasingly polarized Canadian political landscape, the Liberals are referring to a New Deal - capitalized thus - to try and revive urban centres across the country. This plan is a combination of tax cuts(!) and a slight funding increase intended to make more money available to municipalities. The policy is worded mainly in buzzwords ("It's about doing things differently, and doing things better"). However, there are some specific plans, such as formally consulting cities while preparing budgets, shunting some of the gasoline taxes from the federal government to the cities to provide them with another $2 billion over the mandate, and try to begin doing similar things to smaller towns. Other plans in this New Deal involve redeploying some more federal tax revenues to municipal deficits, doubling the $1 billion contribution to affordable rental housing, and so on.
In terms of energy development, something rapidly becoming a growing concern nationally, the Liberals seem to want to put their efforts behind expanding wind power. I don't like the idea of choosing wind power over something more efficient like nuclear power (or something esoteric like solar power satellites, but I'll take what I can get). However, the plans for wind power raise some good points: Canada has a whole lot of unused (and even unusable) land area, most of which is in the north, which tends to have extremely high winds throughout the winter, which is our worst season for electricity use. The basic plan is to get wind power to 5% of national energy generation in a decade - a patient enough goal for sure - by promoting R&D for it in general and building large wind farms, including a 1,000 MW facility in Quebec.
General social programs and infrastructure policy completed, let's move on to the next section - the economy!
The economic section begins with a rough summary of the Liberals' accomplishments, which just about anyone can consider fairly laudable. At the beginning of Chretien's reiginitial mandate in 1993, the economy was in a shambles, recovering from the management of Canada's worst fiscal leader in over a century and carrying an annual deficit of $40 billion. By the 1997-1998 fiscal year, the country's first annual surplus since the 1960s showed up, and a small surplus has been the role for every year since - the first time seven straight surpluses have been achieved. Canada is currently the only G-7 country not engaged in deficit spending, and the debt has fallen by $52 billion, part of a goal of reducing the federal debt ratio from 70% of GDP in 1995 to 25% by 2015.
Overall, the economy has been fairly outstanding in the past several years, to the extent that foreign economists are getting a "WTF?" reaction, and the general positive trend has survived several major natural disasters, the Ontario blackout, and a few disease outbreaks which were supposed to have trashed the national economy nicely.
Another style/language fault in a good chunk of the economic accomplishments section is the tendency to directly compare Canada with the US for a number of things such as employment rates, etc. Although Canada has a significant lead throughout, there are economic problems, such as the erratic performance of the dollar and the decline of the still-important natural-resources industry. While there's little actually false here, there's just enough omission and finger-pointing to come across as in bad taste.
A lot is mentioned with tax policy as well. There have been a number of major tax cuts in the past few years, most of which are aimed at low-income earners, something unheard of in this day and age, with an average overall decrease of taxes by about a fifth. Most of the cuts have been aimed at poorer families and small businesses rather than major corporations, something which has gotten the Liberals significant flak on the right, but which seems to be working. The party's plans for much of the economy consist of little more than "keep doing what we're doing," which is a reasonable policy considering the results so far.
Some more R&D support shows up in this section. Plans include increasing the National Research Council's ties to universities to both help technology transfers from the lab to society, and to provide better resource access for startup businesses.
One thing which jumps out in my perspective is focus in regional development, especially in Atlantic Canada, which has gone either unconsciously or deliberately neglected by the government for decades. The nature of the economy in this region is conflicted, trying to determine whether it's natural-resource or high-technology lately, and the lack of resources to help either has crippled the local economy for some years. Martin wants to encourage a retraining initiative in the region by supporting skills upgrading, infrastructure, and more R&D support. Other regional plans include closer federal involvement with Ontario's heavy industry and agricultural assistance to the western provinces.
The next chapter gets into my favorite stuff for this party - foreign affairs.
Traditionally Canada has been a middle power on the world stage, generally making up for a lack of economic or military power with backchannel influence and a generally-good reputation. Internal pressures of the past decade, accompanied by the national peacekeeping tradition, have led some to want the country to take a more active stance in global affairs. The document comes straight out saying that "we need to change the way we do things because the world has changed."
"There is no longer a major problem in the world that does not affect us," the bulk of the policy area begins, stepping into its "Peace and Nation Building" heading, which is Canadian jargon for national defense policy. Traditionally, the Forces have had a focus on UN operations, particularly peacekeeping. Events in the Balkans, Rwanda and currently in Afghanistan have urged a rethinking of several policies, however, and the Liberals seem to wish to give the military more teeth, moving it to the primary mission of "reviving failed states" rather than simply maintaining a quiet status quo. To this end, the party wants to throw a number of supports at the troops, including upgrading equipment for all three branches, a large (30%!) increase in defense spending over five years, and providing tax exemptions for soldiers placed in combat situations. More specific plans include raising a new army brigade and enlarging the Reserves by 3,000 personnel.
For matters of international aid and development, a number of other plans are being put into motion. Examples including the expansion and deployment of the "Canada Corps" - something I hadn't heard of before, but which seems to be a kind of nationalized version of the Peace Corps - and plans to forgive the debts of nine of the world's least-developed countries, in addition to five others whose debts have already been written off. The final note in this section is a large contribution to the WHO's funding of AIDS fighting, with Canada taking up half the $200 million required for the WHO's plan to treat three million AIDS victims in poor countries by next year.
One final proposal the platform ends with discusses the expansion of the economic leadership of the planet. The G-8 has been the de facto head of the global economy for most of a decade, but a number of increasingly powerful economic voices such as India, China and Brazil have been left out. Paul Martin has already attempted to implement a G-20 to replace the G-8, giving these and other nations a seat at the table.
----
Overall, the platform impresses me. The general plan involves a combination of spending increases in a few major areas - health care, the environment, and national defense are the three biggest recipients. Funding will come from a mix of shuffling around internal revenues and taking advantage of the increased prosperity of the national economy. The five-year fiscal projection involves expenditures of roughly $1.03 trillion, backed by revenues of $1.08 trillion, providing for enough of a per-year surplus to prepare for unforseen things and work against the national debt. The platform covers roughly two-thirds of planned resources, leaving a sizable balance of money available to deal with other areas. Essentially, they're planning for a period of slow but steady growth for the next five years to support national policies.
Some of the policy issues of the past few years are largely absent from the platform, however. One of the main ones which is absent is a broader look at education. The university-student demographic has been concerned about skyrocketing tuition rates, especially in Conservative-held provinces. The general "brain drain" of highly-trained people in the academic and medical professions to the south and east has been a matter of concern, but it is also slowing down, so perhaps they're extrapolating a gradual end to it. A few civil rights situations in Canada, particularly the immigration and gay marriage issues, go fairly unremarked. The Liberals' stance on the latter has been extremely positive, however, and Paul Martin has been making moves on refugee claims as well, so perhaps they're trying to let their actions speak rather than their words.
That's my general look at the platform for now, condensed from sixty pages to, uh, slightly less. Tomorrow I'm going to bite the bullet, cross myself, make sure my shots are updated, and take a look at the Conservative Party's platform for the election.
I'm about halfway through going through the Liberal platform and more than slightly running out of steam, considering the time. The whole monstrosity will be up tomorrow.
When I'm king of the future, political platforms will be terse buggers.
Mr. Chalabi and the INC were until recently on the payroll of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Directorate for Human Intelligence. ... The DIA relationship with Mr. Chalabi's INC is continuing through the new Iraqi Defense Ministry, officials said. [Emphasis added]
Thanks to War and Piece for the link. The blog has many interesting articles this week that haven't made it into the popular blogs yet. Check it out.
CIA Director George Tenet unexpectedly resigned a week ago, an event that quickly faded from the national unconciousness. Making it more interesting, James Pavitt coincedentally resigned at about the same time, to be replaced by Stephen Kappes. Pavitt is the Associate Director of Operations, or the "spookmaster" as a Ziwethey user dubbed him, and like Tenet a Clinton holdover.
Paraphrasing the Rumsfeld doctrine, there are a lot of things we don't know and even more things we don't know we don't know. When we don't know anything, it's time for the conspiracy theories! Is Tenet expecting to be cast as a scapegoat for intelligence failures, or is he hoping to say things as a civilian that he couldn't say before, or is he really quitting to be with his family? Or did he quit because Al Gore asked him to?
The BBC picked up this QOOC from Tenet, which can become frightening when you concoct a conspiratorial context for it:
In a farewell speech to CIA employees, Mr Tenet said his resignation had "only one basis in fact: the well-being of my beautiful family".
The World Socialist Web Site looks for a reason, touching on many points, but doesn't come up with anything. This quote from Dianne Feinstein should have gotten more coverage:
"We're in the middle of a major alert with respect to the anticipation that there might be another attack on our own country. And to have the head of the intelligence community resign at this particular point in time is very unusual."
And finally, Capitol Hill Blue paints a troubling picture of the resignation.
Ronald Kessler of USA Today has a followup article attacking these conspiracy theories and offering a more mundane explanation: Tenet can't afford to put a kid through college on a CIA Director's salary and the stress of the job is killing him.
Perhaps that's all there is to it. It's a possibility, just as everything else is a possibility with what we have to go on, but it's not nearly as entertaining as the others.
Update 2:48PM Jun11: I should have sat on this article for another day, since JWZ cited the best conspiracy theory so far: Tenet and Pavitt resigned so that Bush couldn't order them not to testify against him in the upcoming impeachment hearings being pushed by the CIA in retaliation for the Plame Affair. It's a fun read.
The torture scandals at Gitmo and in Iraq just keep getting worse and worse with each passing day...
From Gitmo, courtasy of the NY Times (Reg required):
Reversing itself, the Army said Tuesday that a G.I. was discharged partly because of a head injury he suffered while posing as an uncooperative detainee during a training exercise at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The Army had previously said Specialist Sean Baker's medical discharge in April was unrelated to the injury he received last year at the detention center, where the United States holds suspected terrorists.
Mr. Baker, 37, a former member of the 438th Military Police Company, said he played the role of an uncooperative prisoner and was beaten so badly by four American soldiers that he suffered a traumatic brain injury and seizures. He said the soldiers only stopped beating him when they realized he might be American.
Original story was reported here. Some 'highlights':
They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and unfortunately one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down," said Baker. "Then he - the same individual - reached around and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor. After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds, it seemed like an eternity because I couldn't breath. When I couldn't breath, I began to panic and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was 'red.'"
But, Baker says, the beating didn't stop. "That individual slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me," he said. "Somehow I got enough air, I muttered out, 'I'm a U.S. soldier, I'm a U.S. soldier.'"
So...
Not only did guards at Gitmo beat a fellow soldier pretending to be a detainee for an exercise so severely that he suffered permanent brain injury... not only did they only stop because they noticed he had on US military-issue boots... but the military got caught trying to cover it up. Cripes.
And this didn't set off giant red flashing klaxons about the treatment of prisoners at Gitmo because...?
Meanwhile, back in Iraq, we have this recounting of a talk by Sy Hersh of the New Yorker at the University of Chicago School of Journalism, courtasy of a reader at Brad DeLong's excellent weblog. The paragraph that caught his, and my, eye:
He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, "You haven't begun to see evil..." then trailed off. He said, "horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run."
I'm not a religious man... but dear God, I hope he's lying.
I just took a look over at President Bush's campaign site, something I'm wont to do now and then when I'm feeling particularly masochistic.
Well.
For the most part the Bush administration had been doing an impressively respectful job of both acknowledging and staying somewhat apart from Reagan's death - the pageantries of the funeral, day of mourning, half-masting etc are all traditional and not simply pulled out by executive order. The news services which aren't FOX have settled down as well, and I appreciate the tone even if I don't appreciate the ex-president much. If the current (June 10/04) layout of georgewbush.com's front page isn't blatantly exploiting a death for political gain, I don't know what is.
AMERICAblog has some other examples of this sort of thing. This is a fairly large disrespect carefully disguised as an accolade, and I find myself preferring Kerry's take on what to do in times like this instead. It's not a time for politicking, to say nothing of dragging something as solemn as a head of state's death down into the mud-filled trenches of a modern electoral campaign.
I apologize on the delay for the campaign articles from Canada which I promised you guys; the first of those will be up tomorrow evening.
After the horrors of the Holocaust, the world stood up as one and declared "Never again!"
After the horrors of Cambodia, the world stood up as one and declared "Never again!"
After the horrors of Bosnia, the world stood up as one and declared "Never again!"
After the horrors of Rwanda, the world stood up as one and declared "Never again!"
And, after the horrors in the Sudan are through, the world will undoubtably stand up, as one, and declare "Never again!"
It's starting to ring a little hollow now, though.
This Article in the Washington Post (registration required) back in late February was one of the first mentions the crisis in Sudan got in the western media. Some "highlights":
There have been what Amnesty International calls "horrifying military attacks against civilians" throughout Darfur by the Sudanese government and its militias. The government has sent bombers to attack undefended villages, refugee camps and water wells. The United Nations estimates that 1 million people have been displaced by war and that more than 3 million are affected by armed conflict.
Amnesty International has led the way in reporting on Darfur; one of its recent releases speaks authoritatively of countless savage attacks on civilians by Khartoum's regular army, including its crude Antonov bombers, and by its Arab militia allies, called "Janjaweed."
Here's the long and short of it: the Sudan has an Arab majority and an African minority (primarily in the southern Darfur region of Sudan) which has been in a kind of rebellion against the repressive Arab Sudanese rule from the north. The Arab centered government, in respose, has been sending bombers after villages and critical infrastructure like wells, in addition to giving support to the Janjaweed (Arab militiamen on horseback that go from village to village killing or chasing away any Africans they find, burning any food supplies they find.)
The goal, it seems, is to drive the ethnic Africans out of of Sudan altogether, and to kill those who won't leave. The Christian Science Moniter has an excellent rundown of just how godawful the situation is right now:
Through their mass slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians and the burning of food supplies, the Janjaweed have uprooted about 1.5 million people from their land. Some 200,000 have crossed into Chad, but the Janjaweedhave corralled the remainder into concentration camps within Sudan. There, because of government obstacles to international relief efforts and a shortage of aid, the internally displaced are facing death by starvation and disease.
This, by the way, is the definition of ethnic clensing. And notice the term 'concentration camp'. It is not used lightly.
How bad are things now?
Well, the ethnic Africans in the Darfur region have been driven and herded into an isolated area of the country, and and are desperately short of food and water. Sanitatary conditions are atrocious, disease is rampant... and the rainy season is only a few weeks away.
Why is that important? Well, once the rainy season comes, it will be extremely difficult to get supplies to the isolated region where the refugees are.
So, again, exactly how bad are things? From the BBC:
Last week, a senior aid worker said 300,000 people would starve in Darfur, even if help is sent immediately. Some 10,000 have died in Darfur, since a rebellion broke out last year and one million have fled their homes.
...
"If we get relief in, we could lose a third of a million. If we do not, it could be a million," Andrew Natsios, head of the US Agency for International Development told a UN donor conference last week.
Think about that for a moment. If aid is sent out RIGHT NOW, three hundred thousand people will still die. How in the hell did the international community let things get this bad? The point of standing up and declaring "Never again" is that you're never supposed to let it happen again!
Towards the end of 2001, President Bush was given a memo by the NSC analyzing the Rwandan crisis through the lens of an article by Samantha Powers in Atlantic Monthly, which described the how the Clinton administration failed to save 800,000 Rwandans through bureaucratic incompetance and lack of will in the wake of the Somalia disaster. Upon reading the memo, Bush was said to have written in the margins "Not on my watch."
Well, President Bush, it's happening on your watch. So what are you doing about it?
Well, the UN has (belatedly) called for an immediate infusion of $236 million to help stave off the mass starvation going on in the Darfur region. The US response? They've promised almost $188 million in aid... over the next 18 months.
By then, who knows how many will be dead.
The Sudan is burning. Over a million people are caught in the fire. Meanwhile, Bush and the world are bidding on a spiffy new fiddle.
(Note: Demagogue has had great coverage of the Sudan situation. It's also a damn good blog overall. Read it.)
Today we stumble across this story from the New York Times, which I got via Byron over at Burnt Orange Report. It's covering the gerrymandering mess in Colorado - another mid-census redistrict which, like the Texas one, was technically legal but blew a number of traditions and small-D democratic ideals right out the window. The Colorado Supreme Court called foul on the redistricting, and the federal Supreme Court refused to hear the case, allowing SCOCO's opinion to hold.
Of course, the dissenters in the federal decision were Rehnquist, Thomas and Scalia, but I didn't have to tell you that.
It's a small victory, but it's one nonetheless. It's nice to see one of these worse-than-usual abuses slapped down.
Tomorrow I'm going to try to start reviewing the Canadian political party platforms for the election on the 28th. I'm probably going to start with that of the Liberal Party, unless anyone reading this is curious about any of the other parties first and mentions something.
Hey, I'm Jesse. I'm the new guy. Let's get right to it, shall we?
Right now, thanks in large part to the Bush tax cuts, we're looking at federal budget deficits as far as the eye can see. In an ironic twist bordering on the absurd, it's the Democratic candidate calling for balanced budgets, while the Republican administration tries to minimize the seriousness of the problem.
Up is down, black is white, the lion lies with the lamb, and the liberal is the fiscal conservative.
To be fair, the Bush Administration is making an 'effort' to deal with the deficits, by proposing spending cuts. This ignores the reality of the budgetary situation, though. Around 80% of the federal budget is tied up in four areas: Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, Defense, and debt repayment.
Trying to cut the first two, though a dream of generations of conservatives since the New Deal, is political suicide. Cutting defense spending looked like a realistic possibility after the fall of Soviet Russia and the end of the Cold War, but given our current entanglement in Iraq, that's not likely (unless the cuts are in programs training military police on Geneva Convention rules...)
And the share of the budget dedicated to debt repayment won't go down until the deficits do.
So that leaves trying to balance out the budget by cutting from the remaining 20%. But, as the recent bad press regarding the leaked budget projections for next year showing drastic cuts in such progams as veterans services and Head Start... cutting just about any spending is the political equivalent of giving the Pope a wedgie.
So, unless Bush is willing to bite the bullet and really pressure Congress to cut the real fat in the budget (Pork, unnecessary military projects like the F-22 Raptor, missile defense) - and that's about as likely as Al Franken being a keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention - his approach to balancing the budget just isn't gonna work.
Kerry's could. Emphasis on COULD.
By rolling back the tax cuts for the top 1%, Kerry could afford to pay for some of his proposed spending programs (ie the prescription drug benefit) without raising taxes for most Americans, while leaving enough money to put a dent in the deficit.
Problem is, as popular as a prescription drug benefit under Medicare is, any 'tax increase' (really a reduction of a tax cut) is something that can be demagogued by the Republicans as "Hey, look! Tax and spend liberal! JOHN KERRY IS COMING FOR YOUR MONEY!"
That's problem #1.
Problem #2: Active duty military personnel lean Republican, even though large sections of our military population are disgruntled at the way the Bush administration has handled the war in Iraq.
For Kerry, though, there's a solution to both. And it's simple as can be.
There are a little over 1.4 million active duty military personnel right now. They work their butts off protecting our country, and they're doing their damndest to overcome the blundering by the civilian leadership in the DoD and do right by Iraq.
For their efforts, they're paid worse than full-time Wal-Mart employees.
So reward their hard work. Every active duty military personnel gets a $10k pay raise, effective immediately. Total cost: ~$14 billion a year.
Where do we get the money? By scaling back the Bush tax cuts for the top 1%.
And voila. Kerry has a good slogan for his plan to repeal the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, and he wins the hearts of every underpaid member of our Armed Forces. Plus, as an added bonus, it's (GASP!) the right thing to do.
"$10k/year each. $14 billion a year total. Mr. Bush, why are you denying our troops the pay raises they so dearly deserve to preserve your tax cuts for the top 1%? Shouldn't we be asking them to sacrifice in this time of war, to reward our troops for their hard work defending our liberties and our way of life?"
That's what Kerry should say.
Then I found out what they meant by selling RPGs.
You see, when most of the independent/small press publishers sell RPG books online, they ship them in PDF format. PDF has become an industry standard for shipping large, professionally-formatted documents around the internet with a minimum of fuss. Drivethru, however, is selling PDF format "e-books" using specially-generated Digital Rights Management (DRM) encryption.
What DRM does, is it forces me as a customer to activate or register my purchase with Drivethru. Once that transaction is registered, it then allows me to use the book, but only up to a point. I can't put the file on a CD and open it elsewhere, I can't cut and paste more than 10 pages out of the book every 10 days, and if I purchase another computer, I have to rely on the Drivethru server to provide reauthorization keys for my books. Drivethru's reliance on Microsoft's .NET system is only icing to this particular cake. All of this to prevent "piracy," even though there are already plenty of ways for a determined pirate to circumvent the encryption.
Needless to say, this resembles DIVX, but only a tad less onerous. There's no PPV charge for the same computer, for example. Still, the number of hoops that keep me from fully utilizing the DRM-based product have managed to ensure that I'm not going to be making many purchases from Drivethru until they change their business model. This drives me nuts, because just looking through Drivethru's catalog, I can see myself easily blowing somewhere around $100-$150 on their available books, and then spending another thirty to fifty bucks a month depending on their release schedules. However, as long as they're selling these restricted versions of the files, I'm going to stick to buying more traditional books with the higher pricetag.
The big question is: will this DRM scheme work for the publishers selling through DriveThru? I think it might, but it's a risky gamble. Drivethru has been running for about two months now and only in the last couple of days jumped into the public eye. They claim a fair number of downloads, but at the same time they've also picked up a lot of criticism from people regarding the DRM issue.
Since it's an online business, not taking into account online complaints - especially in a market as small and close-knit as the gaming community - seems like a dangerous path to take. My own expectation is that Drivethru will modify their DRM scheme to fit the requests of their customers. Abandoning it altogether does not strike me as a high probablity unless the community organizes a serious boycott of the company (and the publishers, which also seems unlikely).
Time will tell, I suppose. Though personally I hope they drop the DRM altogether so I can buy out their Cyberpunk 2020 collection.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Department of Defense lawyers knew and approved of the torture in Guantanamo Bay, in a secret working group created by DoD Counsel William Haynes and run by Air Force Counsel Mary Walker.
There are several very interesting things about this report. It supports previous claims of torture in Guantanamo Bay, and even the Wall Street Journal is calling it torture when the mainstream media refuses to so for the same actions in Iraq, but it gets even more interesting than that.
The advice was part of a classified report on interrogation methods prepared for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after commanders at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, complained in late 2002 that with conventional methods they weren't getting enough information from prisoners...
In October 2002, the head of military police at Guantanamo Bay, National Guard Brigadier General Rick Baccus, was sacked from the Guard and had his unit disbanded after he insisted on treating prisoners at least sort-of in line with the Geneva Conventions. The official reason for his discharge was that he failed to communicate effectively with his commanding officer, Major General Reginald Centracchio. Baccus was replaced by Major General Geoffrey Miller. Baccus's military police unit, Task Force 160, was merged into the newly created interrogation unit Task Force 170, formed in January 2002 and headed by Major General Michael Dunlavy, and said to include FBI and CIA officers.
It seems logical to conclude that Miller requested authority from the Pentagon to torture prisoners as soon as he got into his post at Guantanamo. It's also possible that he was sent there with that authority, the request being a formality.
Civilian or military personnel accused of torture or other war crimes have several potential defenses, including the "necessity" of using such methods to extract information to head off an attack, or "superior orders," sometimes known as the Nuremberg defense: namely that the accused was acting pursuant to an order and, as the Nuremberg tribunal put it, no "moral choice was in fact possible."
If you've lived on this Earth for more than a few years your attention has been drawn to the second part, but let's go back to the first for a moment. It suggests that torture is acceptable if a captive has information. If the captive does not have information, it stands to reason that mistakenly assuming he does is grounds for torture. Of course all this bantering about little details ignores that the US is bound by the UN Convention Against Torture which covers "all members of the human family", not to mention the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution which forbids all "cruel and unusual punishments" with no loopholes other than the qualification of "cruel and unusual".
Now for the second part; yes, that says the Bush Administration is promoting the Nazi defense. The WSJ quotes the Nuremburg committee as saying "no 'moral choice was in fact possible'" in such situations, but a more telling quote on the committee's attitude would be this: "[t]he fact that the Defendant acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior shall not free him from responsibility, but may be considered in mitigation of punishment, if the Tribunal determines that justice so requires ."
The most important part of the story is the DoD's position on the powers of the President:
"In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional auth ority to manage a military campaign ... (the prohibition against torture) must b e construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his command er-in chief authority," the report asserted. (The parenthetical comment is in th e original document.) The Justice Department "concluded that it could not bring a criminal prosecution against a defendant who had acted pursuant to an exercise of the president's constitutional power", the report said. Citing confidential Justice Department opinions drafted after Sept. 11, 2001, the report advised tha t the executive branch of the government had "sweeping" powers to act as it sees fit because "national security decisions require the unity in purpose and energ y in action that characterize the presidency rather than Congress."
...
the lawyers rely on the "commander-in-chief authority," concluding that "with out a clear statement otherwise, criminal statutes are not read as infringing on the president's ultimate authority" to wage war. Moreover, "any effort by Congr ess to regulate the interrogation of unlawful combatants would violate the Const itution's sole vesting of the commander-in-chief authority in the president," th e lawyers advised.
Likewise, the lawyers found that "constitutional principles" make it impossib le to "punish officials for aiding the president in exercising his exclusive con stitutional authorities" and neither Congress nor the courts could "require or i mplement the prosecution of such an individual."
To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a "presidential directive or other writing" that could serv e as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is "inherent in the preside nt."
Originally, the President's authority to go to war extended only as far as Congress authorized. Later Presidents have been powerful enough to launch attacks on their own initiative, even against the opposition of the Supreme Court, because nobody else commands an army to stop the President's if he chooses to do so. The DoD lawyers are claiming that this therefore implies a legal and Constitutional right of the President to do anything he wants with the Army, regardless of law; which in the last paragraph, extends to disregarding any law, because the President has the power of the Army behind him.
In Atrios's words, the United States becomes "an elected dictatorship"; and if the President can ignore any laws, who is to say he must follow the laws about holding elections? This is the monarchist strain rising, a desire to establish an absolute ruler of the United States. Nothing could be more fundamentally opposed to the principles the US was founded upon, and these are the people Bush is appointing as judges.
Phillip Carter has some analysis on the actual unConstitutionality of the DoD's position. Another site with analysis is Billmon's Whiskey Bar.I might be a little late with this one, but for today's news we have an article from the New York Times:
Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, Wednesday, June 7--The German Atlantic Wall has been breached.Thousands of American, Canadian and British soldiers, under cover of the greatest air and sea bombardment of history, have broken through the "impregnable" perimeter of Germany's "European fortress" in the first phase of the invasion and liberation of the Continent.
The anniversary of the Normandy invasion was commemorated today (I'll spare you my usual arms-length link list, but just pick a news source that isn't FOX) in a few ways more significant than usual.
As the sixtieth anniversary of the landing, this will probably be the last nice-even-number anniversary of the invasions attended by a large group of veterans - some twelve thousand were present for the services. As well, this is the first anniversary of the landings in which a Russian head of state was present - and the first in which a German head of state was, as well, with Schröder accepting an invitation from France.
The German head of state went so far as to declare the outcome of the Second World War a "victory for Germany" rather than a "victory over Germany" - which, in a sense, it was. We should remember that this campaign freed far more than the populations of France and the Low Countries from the rule of a regime which really did deserve the epithet "evil."
Looking at the numbers from the Normandy campaign, one is struck by how much of a difference of scale there is between fighting then and now. The United States is currently engaged in a war where its casualties from a year of combat are approaching six or seven thousand - roughly a thousand killed and the rest wounded - to say nothing of losses among the Iraqi and Taliban armies, and the Iraqi and Afghan civilians. By the standards of our own day, these are appalling figures, and we are right to be concerned about them. But to illustrate how things change, here are some other numbers. We all know the significance, and most of us know the history, of this campaign, but here are some elements which probably don't immediately come to mind to most of us who look at the invasion abstractly, as scattered snapshots or division markers on maps.
For two months prior to the Normandy invasion, Allied air and sea forces worked on softening up the landing area, as well as making diversionary attacks elsewhere along the Atlantic Wall. In these battles, 2,000 aircraft and 12,000 men were lost.
On June 6, 1944, 156,000 Allied soldiers, supported by 15,000 aircraft and 1200 warships assaulted the beaches of Normandy. Opposing them on the beaches were 15-30,000 German soldiers from the Seventh Army, parked behind a network of pillboxes, trenches and defenses four years in the making, with 2,000,000 mines dotting the landing beaches. On the end of the first day, each side had lost 10,000 killed and wounded; by June 11, the Allies had landed as many men on the Norman beaches as had been evacuated from Dunkirk four years earlier.
The Battle of Normandy raged until August 30, 1944. By that time the Allies were firmly entrenched in Europe. They had taken 200,000 casualties - 60,000 dead and 140,000 wounded or missing. The Germans facing them lost a similar number of killed and wounded, with 200,000 more taken prisoner. During the campaign, losses on both sides averaged out to about 5,000 killed and wounded - every single day.
There is a reason I won't casually throw around comparisons to the Second World War - that is because there has been nothing like it, with the possible exception of the greater battles of its predecessor. The fighting involved in any one day of this war is probably beyond the comprehension of just about every person who will read this post, including the person who is writing it. Most of the things which happened over the six years of the European war or the fourteen years of the Pacific war simply cannot be compared to anything we've witnessed.
We've fought wars since - far too many of them. However, the Normandy campaign is special, as one half of the great pincer movement which brought that greatest of wars to its end. Since then, there hasn't been have been wars, slaughters and even genocides, but there hasn't been a single conflict which has approached the Second World War in scope or cost.
So, when you get a chance today, think about what happened to the young men in Europe three generations ago. Look at the history and try to understand how it led to the longest relative peace in human history - and look at the numbers to try and understand just how much this new era cost to build.
I've been busy with other stuff today, so I'm only gonna do a blip of a post now.
First of all, I'm sure you guys have all heard The Event Of The Day, so I'm not going to waste your time providing my own take on it. This article over at the Daily Kos says it better than I could.
What I want to point you guys at is something a bit more on the onwards-and-upwards track: it looks like Scaled Composites is going to make their first manned spaceflight, as opposed to just going really really high in the atmosphere, in just over two weeks. This isn't the actual prize shot, either, just their attempting to get someone up and down as another test along the road to that shot.
I'm impressed at the mix of caution and speed they're undergoing here, as well as the attitudes of the other contestants who are being left further and further behind:
"If you want to wake up Bay Street and Wall Street, there's no better way than having one of us fly to 100 kilometres," said Geoff Sheerin, Canadian Arrow team leader. "So we're thrilled."In the end, we all want to win that prize. But the real prize is the industry.
Considering what's at stake for this sort of thing (both in the financial and the history-book sense), I can't think of a better attitude to go towards this thing with.
Hi, it's katster, pointing to a few things that I found interesting out on the web, the wide world web...
First of all, let's start off at Collective Sigh in which Andante muses on the reality show she's living in called life. As a newly graduated college student attempting to find my way into the world, it makes me nervous that this is what I'm stepping into. Andante does a really good job of summing up why the Bushies are confused that consumer confidence is still dropping despite more jobs and what appears to be a recovery. Definitely worth the read.
Via Primis, we get pointed to ImplosionWorld, a site dedicated to those who make things go boom. Legally. One of the more interesting stories here is that of the airplane and the communications tower, and the bizzare story of how one happened to end up in the other and what had to be done about it.
Amp wants us to spread the word about what scum piercing-magic.com is, so if you're into that sort of thing and read this blog, consider yourself informed. Not that I buy that stuff, but... :)
I figured I'd mention, given the debate raging around the blogosphere, that the group team of the NFZ is made up of four guys and a girl, but the only one of us that has an advanced degree at the moment is the girl. (That would be me, btw.) So we're not quite meeting blog demographics over here at the NFZ, but hey, we do our part.
That sums up this episode of the randomness post here on the Zone, tune in tomorrow to see if Zibblsnrt or Warrior Tang returns to their usual well-thought commentary as opposed to my randomness. ;)
As seen in the lj of colinwalker. The NFZ needs some humour every once in a while, so I figured I'd share. :)
A lobbyist, on his way home from work in Washington, D.C., came to a dead halt in traffic and thought to himself, "Wow, this seems worse than usual."He noticed a police officer walking between the lines of stopped cars, so he rolled down his window and asked, "Officer, what's the hold-up?"
The officer replied, "The President is depressed, so he stopped his motorcade and is threatening to douse himself in gasoline and set himself on fire. He says no one believes his stories about why we went to war in Iraq, or the connection between Saddam and al-Qa'ida, or that his tax cuts will help anyone except his wealthy friends. And, after he spent a fortune on campaign ads, he's still pretty much neck and neck with Kerry in the polls. So we're taking up a collection for him."
The lobbyist asked, "How much have you got so far?"
The officer replied, "About 14 gallons, but a lot of folks are still siphoning."
One of the Internet's strongest points is that it tends to allow for a free and open exchange of information on a scale never before seen. Things such as Usenet, the Web as a whole, and more specifically the constellation of weblogs NFZ is a part of are basically limitless piles (or bottomless pits) of such information, covering all topics known to man, a few which aren't, and a few which probably shouldn't be.
It only makes sense, of course, that such a network operates from time to time (or all the time) as a rumour mill. This is fairly obvious; Lord knows the blogosphere operates on the principle. Rumours are like most other forms of information in that they can be true or false; however, they're also a lot more based on simple hearsay or extrapolation.
I like to think that I try to avoid that sort of thing by at least attempting to back up whatever I post with a few links and facts, though I know I'm hardly infallible. On the other hand, there are folks who are somewhat less scrupulous. When alarmist or sensationalist reporting, which thrives on rumour, meets a medium like the Internet, where there are few if any obstacles to fast information flow, nastiness can result.
Thanks to my friend Susie, the story of the day is a column on New York Metro from one Alexandra Polier, who was targetted by Drudge on the flimsiest of pretenses and faced a campaign to declare her the next Monica Lewinski.
It's a bit of a lengthly read, but it also shows the ways in which these sorts of things spread, as well as how quickly and irrevocably they tend to get around. Some of the descriptions of the scandal-hunting reporters themselves are about as probably even more disturbing than the whole attack in the first place.
[I quote the entire mail from Dave Farber's Interesting People list.]
This is just Strangelovesque....What was the password which controlled the firing of America's ICBMs for years during the height of the Cold War?
00000000 That's right. For *all* of them. The Permissive Action Link codes for all of Americas missiles provided less protection than on an average suitcase.
[It's fair to note that there were a lot of other controls, such
as the dual key system. However, it appears that a pair of
rogue controllers could have unleashed Armmagedon - pt]
The entire article that the email pointed out can be found at http://www.cdi.org/blair/permissive-action-links.cfm, and it's quite the doozy.
There are always ways around every well-meant system, and it's probably something we ought to keep in mind. It's a definite problem in computer security today -- how do we keep the hackers out? And a lot of the time, it turns out, no matter how secure the computer is, there are always ways, and most of those ways have to do with people.
People, you see, do silly and strange things. One of the easiest ways into a secure system has to do with a concept called social engineering, in which you cause somebody who knows a secret to believe you're authorized to tell the secret as well.
In this case, it wasn't quite social engineering, but it was
