By Richard D. Erlich

I was only half-listening each time, but I heard a couple times on the radio the assertion that what Americans want for health insurance is choice.

Well, here's one American who doesn't particularly want choice, or, more exactly, choice isn't something I want to need. What I want is what I had for my adult life up to retirement: decent coverage I didn't have to worry about.

As a student, I had access to student health services. I was convinced the student health service at the University of Illinois, Urbana -- as opposed to the excellent veterinary-care clinic -- was part of an AMA plot to turn young Americans against socialized medicine. Still, the health service was good enough for my undergraduate needs, and when I got older and started earning a bit of money, I supplemented the health service with Carle Clinic, at the time, a real HMO: a low-cost health-maintenance organization.

As a university faculty member and indirect employee of first the State of Illinois and then the State of Ohio, I participated in university health plans. I got insurance automatically, as part of my compensation package. The coverage was good; the co-pays reasonable -- and when an insurance company bureaucrat got between me and my physician, I had the phone number of a university bureaucrat whose primary job was running interference for university employees trying to get payments from our insurance company.

The system was imperfect, but pretty efficient.

Shopping, period, is not my idea of a good time -- yeah, I'm a guy -- and high-risk shopping for something complicated and important is my idea of a very bad time. Shopping was also not part of my job; nor was arguing with 20-something punk insurance company flunkies. Time spent on health insurance would have been time I wasn't doing my job; as far as my employer and I were concerned, it would have been nonproductive, wasted time.

Now I'm retired, and my time is my own; but I'm close enough to death to really value that time, and I'm more anxious than ever to avoid shopping for insurance, reading policies, and/or fighting with corporate "minicrats" professionally obligated to try to deny coverage.

Fortunately, I've got Medicare -- or, I think I do (I forgot to make quarterly payments automatic). And I have a pension and a secondary policy through my pension plan.

All Americans should have it as good, or better. Ideally, from this point of view, we'd have a National Health Service, or at least single-payer health coverage. In any event, what I want and what I think we all need isn't particularly choice but one system that is flexible, simple, automatic, and -- including considerations of nonwasted time -- efficient.

Richard D. Erlich is professor emeritus at Miami University, currently living in Ventura County, California.

Posted by Mark at 1:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Richard D. Erlich

Before the Taliban take over more of Afghanistan and set their sights on Pakistan and its nuclear arms, before Mexico becomes an open battleground for the drug trade in the United States, before the State of California is nudged further toward bankruptcy because we can't afford room and board for a huge prison population, and before another generation of American young men of color find themselves more likely in prison than a university--before things get even worse, can we Americans finally have an adult conversation about drugs and drug policy?

Such a conversation might begin with a story I heard from a cop who had brought a truant schoolchild home to her mother. The girl had missed a lot of school because she was often drunk. The mother's reaction: "Well, at least she's not on drugs!"

The cop resisted the temptation to shake the mother and scream at her that her little girl was an alcoholic; the girl was on drugs and a drug addict: by any honest definitions of "drug" and "addict."

Honesty is a good place to start: alcohol is a drug, and so are nicotine, caffeine, Viagra, aspirin, antibiotics, and anabolic steroids.

Once in a literature class we needed a formal definition of "drug," and a student said a drug was a substance, often manipulated by people, that has a psychological and/or physiological effect when introduced into the body. I noted that such a definition would include even white sugar; the student replied only, "Well?"

He had a point. In Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, there's a reference to a "poor pennyworth of sugar-candy" that's both a snack and a drug to make one "long-winded" (3.3). In Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Sidney W. Mintz has sugar as a "food-drug." And seeing sugar as a drug as well as food is useful for seeing how important drug production has been in the history of the Americas and for how long there's been an intimate connection among drugs, the state, and organized crime.

Sugar and molasses, and the sugar-product rum--along with tobacco--were crucial parts of the triangular commerce that had as its most notorious portion the trade in slaves from West Africa.

Many Americans were in the drug business from our beginning, and, by historical standards, the narco-crime lords of today are small-time hoods when put against evil on the scale of the slave-trade.

So we've got a culture heavily into drugs, a culture that has known sin, and we're going to have to deal with that--but we can deal with it.

A student who'd become a drug counselor asked me if I remembered the fears of a heroin epidemic when US troops came home from Vietnam. We had a fair number of soldiers who used heroin in 'Nam, and we'd been warned that many would bring their habit home.

There was no epidemic.

Heroin use was fairly common among troops in Vietnam because pain was common. The great majority of apparently addicted soldiers left their pain in Vietnam and with it their more powerful painkillers. If they came home to a decent neighborhood and a decent life, they left their drug as easily as people leave even more powerful painkillers when they leave the hospital. If the ex-soldiers came home to pain, in areas where heroin was easily available, then there was a good chance they'd go back on heroin.

As my ex-student taught me, it's never "The Addict" and "The Drug"--abstractions worse than useless--but real-world addicts with different metabolisms in complex social contexts interacting with a wide range of drugs.

With an honest definition of "drugs," we can look at history and sociology, and then take two important steps to deal with America's drug problems. First, we should lump drugs together and consider the role(s) of drugs in our society from aspirin to heroin to alcohol to antibiotics; and then we must very carefully distinguish among drugs and their uses and abuses.

Graham Nash notwithstanding, we cannot really "change the world-- /
Re-arrange the world"; but we can stop lying to ourselves about "A Drug-Free America" and get on with what can be done to minimize harm from drugs and maximize their usefulness.

In an earlier time of economic distress--and none too soon--America gave up on the capital "P" Prohibition of beverage alcohol; we can be equally smart about easing or eliminating many of our current prohibitions, however much Americans hate to quit, even when we're quitting banging our heads into walls.

We can, though (maybe) be smarter than the Americans who ended alcohol Prohibition. If we deal with psychoactive drugs as a group, within a broader consideration of drug use generally, I think we'll conclude that we can more than make up for any problems with legalizing drugs like marijuana and heroin if we forbid their advertising and marketing and apply similar prohibitions to alcohol and nicotine products. As funny as the Cheech and Chong routine is, it would be bad to have commercials touting, "Acapulco Gold Is Bad-Ass Weed"; even so, it's probably a bad idea to have great commercials and attractive packaging for alcohol products.

To update a point from John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" (1859), a product can be legal, but pushing the product can be strongly regulated.

Beer and wine will have to remain widely available, but anything stronger can go into clean and safe, but definitely stodgy "Drug Stores" where the single malt scotch can sit next to liquid THC--smoking marijuana should be discouraged--in plain black-on-white packages telling adult customers, as honestly as bureaucrats can, what the drug will do for them, and what it might do to them.

That's one possible outcome, one you might not like, especially if your drug-of-choice is fancy scotch. I won't press the point. What I will press is that we have to move now to serious discussion.

We cannot afford narco-terrorists winning in Afghanistan or in Mexico. We literally can't afford to maintain a large and aging prison population. And we never could afford the dishonesty, nor the class, race, ethnicity, and generational conflict at the corrupt heart of "The War on Drugs."

It's not a war with drugs; it's a set of social issues, including problems in public health. Let's quit the war and get to work on the problems.

Richard D. Erlich is an emeritus professor, Miami University (Oxford, OH), who retired to Port Hueneme, CA.

Posted by Mark at 1:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Richard D. Erlich

Okay, here's an angle on the Michael Phelps marijuana debate you haven't seen yet: grammatical.

Consider the following sample sentence: "The police broke in and saw in the sordid, sinful scene alcohol and drugs, a bong and drug paraphernalia, a pistol and weapons, and an editor and human beings."

In approximately 16,500 instances on the World Wide Web the name "Michael Phelps" was associated with the phrase "alcohol and drugs" or "drugs and alcohol," and, I am certain, most readers read over the phrase with no problems.

There's a problem, a problem my sample sentence should make clear.

A bong is an item of drug paraphernalia; pistols are weapons; editors are human beings -- and beverage alcohol, drunk to induce pleasure or avoid pain, is a drug.

To correct the phrase, one can say "alcohol and other drugs" or "alcohol and illegal drugs. Such corrections are easy, and that "alcohol and drugs" is a common phrase is important for the debate on marijuana and other drugs.

Alcohol use as beer is about as old as human civilization. If alcohol is a drug, drug use is at least as old as civilization. And looking at beer, wine, mead, marijuana, coca, opium, psychoactive mushrooms, caffeine -- etc., one can say that the great majority of human cultures have had drug use as a normal activity. You can say it's pathological or sinful, but drug use is statistically normal; people who don't use some drug are unusual, and in a statistical sense, abnormal.

"The exception proves the rule" means that exceptions test rules (compare "The proof of the pudding is in the eating"), and honest debaters should test generalized and sensationalized assertions about DRUGS!! by taking as an example of a drug something like a good Merlot or, for fun with conservatives, Coors beer.

If alcohol is a drug, statements about the risks of drug use must contain references to the personal risks and social costs of alcohol. From there we can go to the history of drug control in the USA, including the capital "P" Prohibition of booze in the early 20th century. And from there we can trace the social effects of Prohibition and compare them with the effects of our current drug prohibitions.

For example, my mother and her sister found themselves avoiding bullets behind a car during a drive-by shooting on a street in Chicago. That was during Prohibition, and Chicago-area gangs were working out disputes over, primarily, booze-distribution territory.

Sound familiar? Well such "Capitalism by other means" made economic street-sense during Prohibition, and violent gang competition continues to make such sense today, with high costs for society. My mother and aunt could've been killed, and gang members and other people are killed.

Further, Prohibition denied the American State tax monies desperately needed during the Great Depression, so it should be no surprise that Prohibition went into effect in the expanding economy of 1919 and got repealed in the depressed year of 1933. "The Great Experiment" became too expensive, both in direct costs and foregone revenue.

In 1919, however, the US was going Isolationist; in 2009, we're up to our figurative corporate butt in two wars. And in one of those wars, in Afghanistan, the figurative "War on Drugs" is getting in the way of a literal struggle against extremists.

Michael Phelps has some things to apologize for. He should apologize again for driving drunk at age 19. And he should apologize for inhaling. Cooled smoke taken with a water pipe is less harmful than hot smoke from a reefer, but Phelps still set a bad example, and set himself up for betrayal, by so openly putting any smoke into his lungs. He should have taken his marijuana in dope tea, banana bread, or bran muffins (brownies are mostly empty calories).

If we remember that it's "alcohol and other drugs," we can see that occasionally getting zonked is normal human, adult behavior. And it's not a bad idea -- a sober driver having been designated -- for a compulsive athlete like Michael Phelps.

Richard D. Erlich is a 66-year-old retiree from Miami University (Oxford, OH); he remembers the 1960s, and 1970s, well enough not to be a total hypocrite.

Posted by Mark at 9:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Richard D. Erlich

I was and remain a "senior for Obama," a 65-year-old who volunteered for Barack Obama's campaign in the California Democratic primary and in the general election. Still, I'll say this much for my fellow "seniors" who opposed Obama: my central reason for supporting Obama is a reason other old people might rationally oppose him.

Barack Obama offers America a chance to get beyond not race or bigotry but at least beyond racism and "the Southern strategy" as influential ideologies and political maneuvers. On the other hand, the election of Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin would have an equivalent effect on sexism, as an explicit ideology of male superiority.

So let's call that a wash and acknowledge that one could oppose Obama without being a racist. But let us include in that acknowledgement the possibility that a few -- repeat: a few -- old whites could believe that the races are equal and that justice demands racial equality but still desire to maintain, for unjust self-interest, white privilege.

If that idea disturbs you, and I hope it does, keep it in mind while I move from race, which wasn't a crucial issue in the election, to age and generation.

A central political issue is always Cui bono? which I'll translate, "Who gains? Who loses?"

Change in the abstract -- and the word was pretty abstract in the 2008 election -- favors young people over old people. Oldsters usually have any established system down pat; changing things undermines that advantage and favors the young.

Getting more concrete, in the period since the "Tax Revolt" and "The Reagan Revolution," America has operated on a system of running up debt and transferring money from younger and often poorer people to older people; for far longer, the human species has run on a system of using up resources and degrading the environment.

"Posterity don't vote," and ordinarily one can add, "neither do young people." Our rule has been, we profit now; posterity and the current youngsters pay later.

Obama is capable of mobilizing masses of people, emphatically including the young. He has built up the political energy for some major change, and that change will have to include cutting back on spreading the wealth to fairly well-to-do old people.

Now, I recently joined the American Association of Retired Persons to help ensure that we current old folks continue to get ours and maybe a bit more; but there are degrees of privilege, and we in America need to slow down the money flow to old folks and redirect more of it back to the young.

We need to help young people by restoring a maimed environment, restoring America's infrastructure and schools -- and achieving a sustainable economy. We need to distribute health-care more equitably, perhaps by opening up Medicare to the young.

So don't think too harshly of the old who voted against Barack Obama; but do remind them that they lost the election, and that that loss should have consequences. The times they have a-changed, and we have a president not beholden to old folks for his election. And he's eloquent enough to move Americans to make some sacrifices. Among those who must agree to some sacrifice are old people like me.

Richard D. Erlich is a retired professor, living on a decent pension in California In advancing age, he prefers to think of himself as an old-fart curmudgeon and prides himself in having gone from angry young man to curmudgeon with few missed steps.

Posted by Mark at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If the Bush administration is bad at one thing (just one?!), it's using logic and reason. President Bush is, at least in my mind, famous for ignoring the finer points of a person's resume and instead focusing on how a person is "a good dad," or "a coach for his son's football team." To Bush, your qualifications lie in what kind of person you are inside, and while this is great for self-esteem, it's terrible in terms of hiring people who can do their jobs well.

And so it is with refuting allegations of wrong-doing. As has been reported today, Ron Suskind's new book, The Way of the World, comes with an allegation that Bush & Co. fabricated a 2001 letter between Saddam Hussein and Hussein's director of intelligence, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti. The letter purports to discuss how Mohammed Atta, one of the nineteen September 11 hijackers, trained for the hijacking mission in Iraq. If true, the letter would confirm the White House's previously long-held belief that there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda, which would then provide a rationale for invading Iraq.

Which the letter did. But, according to Suskind, the letter was fabricated at the White House's request. And no operating relationship has ever been found between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Any piece of evidence that has ever been put forward as evidence of a relationship between the two (and thus, a justification for the war) has been refuted as unreliable at best and an outright lie at worst. This letter, if Suskind is right, falls into the latter category.

The White House, true to form, is not using logic and reason to dispel this accusation; rather, it has resorted to name-calling. White House spokesman Tony Fratto called the accusations "absurd" and said that Suskind practiced "gutter journalism."

This is something that the White House still hasn't learned, for all of the whistleblowers that have come from it: Paul O'Neill, Richard Clarke, Scott McClellan, et al. The White House says, through its spokespeople, that these whistleblowers are bad people and calls their motives into question, but never refutes the merits of the arguments beyond calling them something general, like "absurd."

Here in the world of logic and reason, it doesn't matter if a person has an axe to grind or is a gutter journalist; what matters is whether or not the statements are true. Certainly Harriet Miers could have been the nicest, sweetest lady in the country, but that did not make her qualified to sit on the Supreme Court.

Sorry, White House, you'll have to do better than "absurd" if you want to deal with such an alarming charge.

Posted by Mark at 2:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sure, we all knew it, but how big of a moron could he be?

Today, he writes about the economic stimulus package passed by Congress, which would put cash into the hands of taxpayers. Beck thinks the plan is flawed, but not for the right reasons. The real reason the plan is flawed is that consumers -- who got into this mess by racking up more debt than they could pay off -- are expected to use their $600 tax rebates to buy more stuff, especially durable goods, to boost the revenue of corporations, which will in turn have more money to buy capital goods from each other, invest, and hire new employees.

This will not happen.

For one, consumers will take that $600 and immediately pay down their debt. They're dumb, but they're not cretins. They already bought the 42" plasma TV. Now it's time to pay it off.

Second, with the number of jobs being outsourced, companies will indeed turn around and hire new labor -- in another country! China, Mexico, and India will benefit from this portion of the stimulus package. And it looks like companies don't want more labor, at least, not skilled labor. GM wants to buy out the contracts of 74,000 North American employees and replace them with less-experienced workers because the new workers are cheaper. You'll recall that Circuit City tried this last year, and it was a rousing success.

Just kidding. The fired employees were furious and customers were frustrated by the inexperienced new employees.

Glenn Beck objects to the stimulus package because it doesn't do enough for big business. The old supply-side theory works only if companies are investing in labor in this country. And they're not.

So, Beck's brilliant idea is to issue debit cards -- debit cards! -- for quick spending. Yes, that's the ticket: spend more money. He cites the success of the $2000 debit cards given to victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 as an example of why his idea works. But his own precious FOX News reported in 2005 that FEMA scrapped their debit card program after it had existed for only two days. Cards were issued only to evacuees in Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.

See, debit cards give people money now, whereas tax breaks take some time to go into effect. Welcome to fiscal policy, Glenn. He also proposes that the cards have a six-month expiration date, forcing people to spend their money immediately or they lose it. What planet is Glenn Beck from? Does he really think that this is the answer: mandatory spending to fill the coffers of companies that may or may not, in their infinite sense of charity, use the money to make the economy better?

Then again, he is the same person who told Keith Ellison (D-MN), America's first Muslim congressman, "[W]hat I feel like saying is, 'Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.'" He also supports an amendment to the Constitution prohibiting flag burning.

I'd make him a SEDHE Villain of the Forever, but to be a Villain of the Forever, a person has to take actions that harm the United States. Glenn Beck just spouts stupidity, and thankfully, no one listen to him.

Posted by Mark at 1:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By now, pretty much everyone knows that "payday loans" are a big scam. Or, if they don't know already, they should read more. A payday loan is an advance on your paycheck. It's used by people who live paycheck-to-paycheck to support themselves in between paychecks. The problem is that these same people can't secure real loans from normal banks. Banks' interest rates are capped by the federal government, but since payday loan companies aren't banks, they aren't regulated as such. This means they can engage in usury, the practice of charging illegally high interest rates (at least, the rates would be illegal if these payday loan companies were banks).

Most payday loan places are located in low-income areas, where people don't have the collateral or credit score to get real loans. It's a good sign that your city or town is on the outs if payday loan stores start popping up.

You'll recall that this is the same behavior that has caused the bulk of our current financial crisis, except instead of dealing with a thousand or two thousand dollars, we're dealing with hundreds of thousands of dollars per person.

Payday loan places charge as much as 400% APR. This means that, in order to get a thousand-dollar loan to tide you over between paychecks, it may cost you four thousand dollars. In this story from The Denver Post, it took four years and $8,000 for Linda Medlock to pay off a $500 payday loan.

Want to sue a payday loan company for usury? If the contract you signed with them contains an arbitration clause, you'd better think again. In 2006's Buckeye Check Cashing, Inc. v. Cartagena, the Supreme Court denied respondent Cartagena the right to sue Buckeye Check Cashing for usury, since the contract contained an arbitration clause. Since arbitration clauses are severable from contracts, the Court ruled, any issues about the enforceability of the contract go into arbitration, not a court. And we know how fair and balanced mandatory binding arbitration is.

Now, with a new wave of recession coming over the country -- a wave in which even middle-class people are being affected -- companies that you never thought would get into the check-cashing business have found new opportunities. Say's Law is right: supply does create its own demand. In this case, it's tax season and there's a supply of people who need fast money. H&R Block and others have created the "refund anticipation loan," a loan granted to you by H&R Block based on what you think your tax refund will be. Don't be fooled; H&R Block is selling you the same bologna as the variable-rate mortgage companies and the payday loan companies:

What you may not notice is the exorbitant annual percentage rate on that loan. But consumer groups have. They say these short-term, high-interest loans prey on the very people who can least afford them.

Critics of refund loans, as the loans are commonly known, point to the disparity between the tax advances and other credit offerings aimed at wealthier customers.

Tax preparers, both independent operations and major chains, charge interest rates that can run on an annualized basis well into triple figures, all for the privilege of getting money a few days earlier. The IRS further mitigates the risk to lenders with its Debt Indicator service, alerting them to any claims (child support, unpaid federal student loan) against refund-loan applicants' refunds.

What's worse is that many people who get a refund anticipation loan don't understand that it's a loan on their refund, and once they get the refund, they'll need to pay back the loan, plus an exorbitant interest rate. So, if you get that $600 refund from George W. Bush, don't put it into a refund anticipation loan. And for crying out loud, don't go buy a refrigerator like the president wants you to; use it to pay off your debt!

Posted by Mark at 6:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

10:15 AM PST -- I arrived at the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) an hour before my flight was to leave. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that this is the holiday travel season, and four million other people were waiting in line just to check in. United’s policy is that no one -- no one! -- can board a flight with checked luggage within 45 minutes of departure. I had missed the deadline by five minutes due to the length of the check-in line. Thankfully, a handy customer service telephone was at the kiosk, and I spoke to someone in Darkest Africa who told that I would be unable to check in, since it was less than 45 minutes before the flight. I told him that I knew that now, was there anything he could do to put me on another flight? He said that it would be $50 to put me on standby to Chicago. “Great,” I said. “I’ll complain later.” He said I would have to talk to a ticket agent to be put on standby.

I flagged down one of the few ticket agents that are employed anymore to stand behind the self-check-in e-ticket kiosks. I labored under the impression that the man from Darkest Africa had somehow used the power of technology to patch my problem through to the nearest computer terminal. No such luck. I explained my problem to the ticket agent, who did the best she could to assist me. Seriously, SFO was a mad-house. The main security checkpoint at Terminal 3 (the United terminal) had a line going all the way down the terminal. What no one apparently knew was that there was another security checkpoint with a much shorter line. Why no one funneled all that traffic down there is a mystery to me. Such are the ways of airlines and airports.

Ticket agent lady put me on standby to a flight to Chicago. My original itinerary was from SFO to Las Vegas to Chicago to Cleveland. San Francisco and Chicago are both United hubs, so I would have ended up in Chicago no matter what.

1:00 PM PST -- The next flight to Chicago was at 9:45. At 9:45, we were informed that the flight was full and there were no standby seats available. Our standby information would be rolled over to the next Chicago flight, at 10:45. So we hauled ourselves to another gate. I noticed that I was in the same boat as two men and a woman. The man at the gate for the second Chicago flight said that the flight had been overbooked (note the interesting use of language here; in the past, it was called “oversold,” but that terminology places the agency on the airline for selling too many seats; when it’s called “overbooked,” it’s the customers’ fault for booking more seats than there are available, those nasty customers!). Don’t expect any first-class upgrades, he said. I asked him what my chances were of getting a seat on standby. “Not good,” he replied. The woman who was standing by on the previous flight said that she arrived at the airport two and-a-half hours before her flight was supposed to leave. And she still didn’t make the flight. She blamed “traffic control” in the ticketing area. What that meant was that she apparently stood in line for an hour and-a-half as time ticked by and her flight closed. She attempted, she said, to get the attention of a ticket agent -- or something -- to let her move up in the line, but no one did anything. The ticket agent only chided her for not arriving four hours early. She went to the customer service center at Gate 80 to see what they could do. I went there, as well.

I was told at Gate 80 that there was nothing she could do. All the flights for all the airlines were full for today; indeed, they were overbooked for today. My best bet, she said, would be to wait on standby for the rest of the day. I accepted this and went back to the 10:45 flight, where there was still the possibility that there might be seats.

No dice. The flight was totally full. I got rolled over to the next Chicago flight, which left at 11:30. The woman from the previous flights, who told me she was an ER nurse and had no problem dealing with patients spurting blood and as a result didn’t understand how they could mess up the logistics down at the ticket counter, got a flight at 2:00. It all depends on who you talk to, she said. I decided that I would wait for the 11:30 flight, and if nothing panned out, I would go to a different ticket counter.

Perhaps in an attempt to weed out the chaff, the 11:30 flight to Chicago changed gates three times. It was fairly easy to tell where the flight had moved, though. Just look for the unhappy mob milling about outside one of the gates. As expected, 11:30 came and went with no space on standby. I walked to the Gate 80 customer service center and found that the line was snaking down the terminal. I looked for another customer service center, figuring the one at Gate 80 wasn’t the only one in this terminal.

Found it! At Gate 76, which is sort of in a separate wing of Terminal 3, there was a smaller -- but no less able -- customer service center. Thank God for lazy people. I spoke to Sylvia . I explained how I had missed the cutoff by five minutes, how I had been placed on standby, and how three flights had come and gone with no standby space. Sylvia understood and took the time to help me out. She searched all flights for all airlines at all airports for today and said that they were booked. All of them. So she searched some more. She met with partial success: there were spaces on flights to Chicago, and there were spaces on flights from Chicago to Cleveland, but never at times that worked with each other. I had two options: I could fly to Los Angeles International (LAX), then to Washington/Dulles International (IAH), and then to Cleveland. The flight to LAX was at 8 PM, so I would have to spend the night in LAX. Or, she said, I could fly from SFO to Chicago O’Hare (ORD) at 2 PM and then fly from ORD to Cleveland at night. Maybe. Only problem was that the 2 PM flight from Chicago was delayed until 9 PM. It was displayed on all the departure screens, but curiously, the delay was not in her system. She found out only when I told her.

While we were haranguing, the spot on the LAX flight disappeared. She booked me on the 2 PM flight to Chicago, which is really a 9 PM flight to Chicago. I would have to spend the night in Chicago and then get on a 7:15 AM flight to Cleveland the next morning. There was a 4:15 PM flight to Chicago, and I probably wouldn’t make any flights out of Chicago by the time that came in, but she said I could check. She put me on standby for the 4:15 flight.

And now I’m waiting for the 4:15 flight. Admittedly, it was my fault that I got there late. I didn’t think that checking in at 7:45 would be such an ordeal -- in fact, I arrived at the check-in kiosk only five minutes late -- but I accept that. At the same time, United has proven once again that its logistics system is crazy, as it permits flights to be solidly overbooked, and during the holidays. The airlines have complex computer programs that guess how many people won’t show up for a flight and they then sell an equivalent amount of tickets beyond the capacity for a given flight. There is no room for error. Unfortunately, during the holiday travel season, things are tight and I wonder how many extra flights United is flying during this time.

I appreciate the hard work of Sylvia in trying to get me on a flight, even though she fully understood that it was my fault for being late. Rather than give me a bogus answer of, “Keep waiting on standby,” she helped me until she found me a way to get to Cleveland. When dealing with customer service people, I always stress that it’s better to be calm and amiable than angry, frazzled, and demanding. Customer service people have the power to give you what you want, and if you treat them like a fellow human being, they will go beyond the call of duty to help you, as another human being. Become demanding, though, and they will treat you the same way, not like a human being but like the belligerent “customer” that you are. If I hadn’t found her, I would still be trying to fly standby. One of the men from the original standby flight finally got a standby ticket to Chicago, but of course, that was only the beginning of his problems. He would be flying standby out of Chicago, as well. I think the only reason I even got a spot on the 2:00 flight was because it moved to 9:00, and undoubtedly several people changed theirs to the 4:15 flight to Chicago, freeing up space on the 2:00 flight. I’m grateful for that; I’ll take a red-eye. I’d sit behind any number of crying babies at this point.

6:00 AM CST -- I spent the rest of the day hanging out with this woman I described before -- whose name I don’t know. I know that she lives in Arcada and works as an ER nurse. We walked around the airport and watched as the line outside Gate 80’s customer service center grew quite long, and went so slowly that people started sitting down in line. We talked about how we would hate to be those customer service people, that today would have been a great day to call in sick.

Our flight to Chicago went well; both of us slept. Once we got to Chicago, we went our separate ways, as our connecting flights were in different concourses. It’s interesting having these one-time friends, these people whom you talk to freely, even though you met them only a few hours ago, and then leave behind, never to see again. Such is the way of the airport.

I’m in Chicago right now, waiting for my connection in Cleveland to leave at 7:35 AM CST. I have a boarding pass in hand, with a seat assignment and everything. I tried to sleep in the terminal, and for a while, it was quiet. I picked what I thought was a shady spot, but it was right next to the major security check-in area. At about 4:15, a whole bunch of TSA screeners gathered there to talk. I slept through it, anyhow. The airport is something I usually think of as running 24 hours. But it doesn’t run 24 hours; the security areas were closed off, all the shops were closed, and only the Christmas music coming through the speakers and the occasional recording warning that taxis can’t solicit rides were signs that any human beings lived there once.

The security line in Chicago, even at 6:15, doesn’t look that long. The problems in San Francisco seemed to be a Perfect Storm of little things. The man who finally got on the standby flight at 9:00 said that a flight to Boston changed to a smaller plane, forcing about 100 people to fly standby. Since they were already booked on a flight, and it was the airline’s fault that they weren’t booked anymore, they got priority when standby seats became available. This is one of the reasons why we had such a hard time finding standby seats.

7:57 PM EST -- I got into Cleveland right on time: 10:00 AM EST. Then I got home and took a nap.

Posted by Mark at 4:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By a vote of 51% to 49%, Venezuela's constitutional reforms were defeated today.

While there were some good constitutional reforms [en español], like changing the workday from 8 hours to 6, and the work week from 40 hours to 36. But there were more bad reforms, such as:

• President Chavez would be allowed to run for re-election an unlimited number of times;
• The Central Bank would be stripped of its autonomy;
• President Chavez would have control over foreign currency reserves;
• The army would be changed from a "professional" apolitical force to a "popular, anti-imperialist" force (with no mention of its being apolitical);
• The army would be permitted -- and required -- to engage in internal civilian policing;
• High-ranking military officers would be promoted by President Chavez only (as opposed to President Chavez, in concert with the National Assembly)

I have railed against Hugo Chavez before because I feel that he has many dictatorial tendencies.

My friend Alberto suggested that constitutional re-writes in Latin America are not always necessarily bad, since it is often the case that constitutions in that region are written unilaterally to serve the interests of a small group of people. As a result, it may end up that re-writing the constitution is a good thing, since it purges the corruption of previous leaders. While I grant that, the 1999 Venezuelan constitution was definitely not written unilaterally. Half of the articles came from Chavez himself, while the other half of the articles were the result of submissions made by the people. Quite literally, Venezuelans wrote in with their suggestions for constitutional articles. It would be difficult to argue that the 1999 constitution was typical of these dictatorial Latin American constitutions. As a result, I feel confident in saying that a good number of these 2007 reforms are unilateral and unnecessary. There was no corruption that needed to be removed.

Fortunately, the Venezuelan people -- though by a slim margin -- recognized that these reforms were unnecessary and questionable. Why does Chavez need to run for president indefinitely? Why would the military suddenly not be apolitical? And why on Earth does the military need to engage in civilian policing? All of these things can be found in autocratic states, and while Chavez professes democracy (indeed, he claimed that his was the most democratic country in the world), we must judge Chavez against himself, and when we do that, we find that he does not live up to his own standards.

It's also interesting to note that, when facing Chavez supporters, they immediately assume that anyone who is against Chavez is necessarily a neoliberal American imperialist who believes everything the Bush administration says. Chavez himself thinks this. Strangely enough, he has as black-and-white a vision of the world as President Bush does. Whereas President Bush once said that "you're either with us, or you're with the terrorists," Chavez labels anyone who disagrees with him a "traitor." With Chavez, there is no room for debate and no room for nuance. If you disagree with his policies, then you not only disagree with -- and hate -- him, but you also hate Venezuela and necessarily want to see it taken over by the American empire. Does this sound familiar?

Good work, Venezuela!

Posted by Mark at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When Gen. Pervez Musharraf declared martial law last week in Pakistan, he said it was partly due to a rise in extremism in Pakistan. This is reflected in the official declaration of martial law, which notes:

there is visible ascendancy in the activities of extremists and incidents of terrorist attacks, including suicide bombings, IED explosions, rocket firing and bomb explosions and the banding together of some militant groups have taken such activities to an unprecedented level of violent intensity posing a grave threat to the life and property of the citizens of Pakistan.

After setting out extremism as ostensibly the primary purpose of the declaration, he adds that "some members of the judiciary are working at cross purposes with the executive and legislature in the fight against terrorism and extremism thereby weakening the government and the nation's resolve diluting the efficacy of its actions to control this menace." Therefore, the judiciary is partly to blame for the extremism, since it is ineffective due to its working "at cross purposes" with the rest of the government. This explains why Musharraf fired the Chief Justice at the same time he declared martial law. (Actually, it doesn't; he fired the Chief Justice because the Chief Justice has been a vocal critic of his; this declaration just gives a fun pretext for the firing.)

Even if Musharraf can appear to justify martial law by way of cracking down on extremism, that doesn't explain the most recent events coming out of Pakistan. We've learned that, in the aftermath of the declaration of martial law, the police "detained about 500 opposition party figures, lawyers and human rights advocates on Sunday." That's right: "extremists" turn out to be Musharraf's critics and opponents. Surprise! When a president declares martial law, it turns out that he uses the opportunity of the suspension of the constitution to imprison his opponents, critics, and anyone else he doesn't like. Who could have known?

In the meantime, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto has called for protests against Musharraf's declaration. "After the news conference, police officers fired tear gas and beat about 100 of her party workers when they tried to push through police barriers blocking access to the Parliament building." Because that's how you quell terrorist extremism: by beating protesters.

Fortunately, Musharraf doesn't have to suffer the anguish of beating protesters alone. Last Thursday, Venezuelan soldiers "used tear gas, plastic bullets and water cannons to scatter tens of thousands of demonstrators protesting constitutional reforms that would permit Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to run for re-election indefinitely."

Chavez wants the Venezuelan constitution re-written to, as stated above, allow him to run for re-election indefinitely, but also, the new constitution would degrade the autonomy of the Venezuelan armed forces, placing them under Chavez's sole authority, and degrade the autonomy of the Central Bank of Venezuela. Chavez claims that he needs to remain in power longer in order to complete his project of "21st-century socialism."

At the same time, over in the United States, we're having a surreal discussion about whether or not torture is okay. Scott sent me an article from counter-terrorism consultant Malcolm Nance, who says, definitively, "Waterboarding is a torture technique. Period." Nance, "a former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the US Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego," has personally experienced and conducted waterboarding as part of SERE's interrogation training. Note, of course, that students are not subjected to waterboarding so that they can use it on suspects, but subjected to it so that they know what it's like.

Nance says that there are a lot of misconceptions about waterboarding. One misconception is that waterboarding is "simulated drowning." Says Nance, "It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim’s face) and the obstinacy of the subject. "

Ultimately, he says, this will come back around to bite us. "Now American use of the waterboard as an interrogation tool has assuredly guaranteed that our service members and agents who are captured or detained by future enemies will be subject to it as part of the most routine interrogations," says Nance. "Waterboarding will be one our future enemy’s go-to techniques because we took the gloves off to brutal interrogation. Now our enemies will take the gloves off and thank us for it."

And, all the while, the world is a safer place.

Posted by Mark at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Bush administration to children: suck it

Let's start with President Bush vetoing an expansion of SCHIP, the State Children's Health Insurance Program. SCHIP provides health insurance to children whose parents can't afford it. The bill presented to the president would have expanded enrollment from 6.6 million to 10 million by covering children who are just above the poverty line. Those who opposed the bill argued that it's a step toward socialized medicine.

And?

As I pointed out last week, we already have socialized medicine in this country. Medicare, Medicaid, VA hospitals, and those great health plans that members of Congress get -- these are all government-run healthcare programs! Michael Moore's Sicko has undoubtedly frightened Republicans (and Democrats!) who get money from healthcare companies. More than anything else, Moore's film has galvanized popular support for some kind of government-sponsored healthcare program, as poor Republican voters realize that they're being screwed by the private healthcare system. There isn't a single Republican presidential nominee who has a plan for providing some kind of government-backed healthcare; the Democratic nominees, meanwhile, are falling over each other trying to promote their own plans. Of course, in primary season, the goal is to appeal to the base and then, in the general election, try to get everyone else to latch on. It could be that the Republican nominee will succumb to popular demand for healthcare reform after the primaries, so time will tell.

Supreme Court not as conservative as previously thought

Monday, the Supreme Court refused to grant certorari to a case involving birth control, healthcare plans, and religion. Catholic Charities, Inc. -- a private company affiliated with the Catholic Church -- didn't want to provide birth control as part of its healthcare plan to employees. The state of New York disagreed, saying that Catholic Charities is not a "religious employer" as defined by the Women's Contraception Equality Act, and therefore is not exempt from not providing birth control for religious reasons.

This same issue was brought up over three years ago in the California Supreme Court, and they came to the same conclusion. By denying a writ of certiorari, the lower court's ruling stands. And you thought this court was going to be super-conservative!

I thought contractors were contractors

The House of Representatives today passed a bill that would allow prosecution of private contractors in civilian courts. According to NYT, opponents of the bill -- all of whom were Republicans -- argued that "it would insert civilian investigators into areas better covered under military law." But Blackwater contractors are not part of the military. Even though they work under contract for DoD, they're still civilians, and as such should be subject to the same laws as civilians. Giving them a free ticket results in -- oh, guess what? The very kind of activity that occurred last month, prompting the Iraqi government to throw them out of the country.

Thankfully, the bill passed with only 30 "nay" votes, which makes it veto-proof (in that house, anyway) in the event that President Bush vetoes the bill due to his vice president's intimate involvement with Halliburton, Blackwater's parent company. No doubt a veto would be justified with a bunch of BS about contractors needing to do their job effectively without fear of prosecution (although, as we have seen, contractors in Iraq have a nasty habit of not doing their jobs effectively).

UPDATE: Scott, SEDHE's Chief Information Auditor, informed me that Blackwater is not a subsidiary of Halliburton.

Posted by Mark at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After almost six months of haranguing, arguing, disputing, questioning, lying, hearings, ad hominem attacks, and constitutional showdowns, Alberto Gonzales has stepped down as Attorney General, effective Sept. 17. Prior to being Attorney General, Gonzales was White House Counsel. Prior to that, he was President Bush's personal counsel. Prior to that, he was a justice on the Texas Supreme Court. Gonzales has been a Bush man through and through for at least the last ten years. Despite President Bush's assertions to the contrary, Gonzales has handled the Justice Department not with incompetence when it comes to doing his job, but incompetence when it comes to engaging in the lies and cover-ups that are a necessary part of daily life in the Bush administration.

It's no secret that the Bush administration is secretive, going to great lengths to prevent its critics and even the American people from knowing what's really going on in the White House. This tendency first became clear in the summer of 2001, when Vice President Cheney met with unnamed people to craft the administration's official energy policy. Environmental groups suspected that the petroleum-centric nature of the National Energy Policy meant that oil company executives -- who are not strangers to Cheney and Bush -- were involved. Judicial Watch and The Sierra Club sued for the right to know who exactly was involved. The case went to the Supreme Court, which affirmed the administration's justifications of executive privilege in keeping this information secret.

It went only downhill from there. September 11 was a terrific reason to start painting over the White House windows; requests for information could be -- and have been -- rejected due to "national security."

As a Bush acolyte, Gonzales was right up there with Harriet Miers. The two could have been King and Queen of the Bush Loyalty Prom. By all accounts, Gonzales was good at his job. As White House Counsel, it was he who drafted the first legal arguments that the president didn't have to adhere to the "quaint" Geneva Conventions when dealing with enemy combatants. According to former Deputy Attorney General James Comey, Gonzales and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card tried to get a drugged-up John Ashcroft to authorize an extension to the administration's warrantless wiretapping program, despite the fact that Ashcroft had transferred the powers of the Attorney General to Comey prior to entering the hospital for pancreatitis. Being bad at his job wasn't the problem. As we'll see, being bad at the Bush cover-up game was his problem.

As Attorney General, Gonzales vetted the roles of U.S. attorneys, removing anyone who was not a "loyal Bushie." But it was these same U.S. attorneys who would ultimately begin his downfall. Questions began: were these people fired for political reasons? The administration and its loyal mouthpieces (Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Kristol) quickly fired back that U.S. attorneys served at the pleasure of the president, political reasons or not. And while this is true, the firing of these attorneys -- in the middle of a term, not at the beginning of one like the Clinton purges -- was tacky, nevertheless. And so Gonzales visited the Senate for questioning. From March onward, it seemed like he was testifying every week.

So began his downfall.

Gonzales soon found himself caught in a web of lies of Rumsfeldian proportions. He said he had nothing to do with the firings, that other people below him prepared lists of names and all he, Gonzales, did was sign the paperwork. Then we found out that he had attended meetings about the attorney firings, and it seemed that he was the only one who didn't remember them. Gonzales' faulty memory became chronic as he was suddenly unable to remember where he was on particular days, that he had signed particular documents, or that he had talked to particular people.

This initial investigation spawned spin-off investigations. The original series U.S. Attorney Firings morphed into mid-season replacements like Violations of the Hatch Act, Whose Wiretapping Is It, Anyway? and the favorite prime-time drama of the summer, Wheel of Perjury. Gonzales had lied himself into several corners, and when he wasn't intentionally lying, he was accidentally telling the truth, as he did when he inadvertently revealed the existence of another as-yet undisclosed warrant-less wiretapping program earlier this summer. Gonzales was to Congressional investigations what Norman Lear was to TV sitcoms of the 1970s and '80s.

At the end of six months of investigations, where did we end up? The administration refused to budge on the issue of executive privilege. Harriet Miers and Karl Rove ignored Congressional subpoenas, refusing even to show up on Capitol Hill. (Only former White House political director Sara Taylor testified, and many of her answers included the words "executive privilege," but hey, at least she put in an appearance.) We all knew, in our heart of hearts, that these attorneys were fired for political reasons, not the "performance" problems we had been told back in March. But we had no evidence to prove it. Once Gonzales is no longer Attorney General, he will not be in the spotlight. Another poor shmuck -- perhaps Solicitor General Paul Clement or even Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff (late of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, you know) will get the unenviable task of fixing the Justice Department. It doesn't really matter who gets the job, as long as he or she isn't as much of a Bush lackey as Gonzales was.

Which begs the question: why was Gonzales so loyal? He owed his entire career to George Bush, from his post as Justice on the Texas Supreme Court to Attorney General. He continued riding the Bush Train to Hell even when it became painfully clear what the destination was. That's loyalty.

Republicans will suggest that Gonzales' so-called incompetence was caused by Democrats and their incessant hounding of him. "If only they had let him do his job at Justice instead of calling him in for testimony every other day," they'll say, "the Department wouldn't be in the shape it is." But it's not Congress' fault for exercising its role of oversight. That's like a felon who shot at the police blaming them for a gunshot wound. Gonzales thatched his roof; now he had to live under it. Now that he's moved out of that house, with the way the housing market is going, he won't get back nearly what he put into it.

Posted by Mark at 4:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The BBC reports that Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, "has announced plans to change to Venezuela's constitution, allowing him to stand for office indefinitely." Chavez is limited by Venezuela's constitution to serving two six-year terms. His tenure as president would be up in 2012, but in the tradition of dictators, he has decided that it's best for the country that he rule indefinitely.

There's a belief among leftists that Chavez, heir to the Beard of Fidel Castro, is the one person in the world who is man enough to stand up to the United States. Never mind that he's also crazy. He has dinner-dates with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Robert Mugabe, for crying out loud. Does he think he will be taken seriously in world politics if he hangs out with those losers?

Chavez and his supporters insist that this is necessary to inaugurate his "21st-century socialism," but this futuristic title belies a very old motivation: power! All communist countries have gotten stuck at the "dictatorship of the proletariat" phase because once leaders have power, they're unwilling to surrender it. "I doubt there is any country on this planet with a democracy more alive than the one we enjoy in Venezuela today," said Chavez. Really? Because I can think of a bunch more, and all of them involve leaders stepping down once their terms are over. If Chavez really wanted a new-age socialism, he would do what other socialist countries have failed to do: namely, engage in a peaceful transition of power using free and fair elections. Chavez's unwillingness to step aside is cause for alarm, as this is Stage One of dictatorship. It appears that Latin America is heading down the same road it took in the 1970s and '80s, only instead of U.S.-installed and supported dicatorships, we have popular dictatorships.

But, as I've often said, the freedom to choose involves the freedom to choose badly.

Posted by Mark at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Imagine that you're Paul Wolfowitz. As a member of the Project for a New American Century, you suggested that the United States should engage in democratic nation-building throughout the world. As Deputy Secretary of Defense, you helped plan and implement the Iraq War. Then, you "cut and run" by becoming the president of World Bank. That sounds great, except that your girlfriend, Shaha Riza, works at the World Bank. In fact, she works in a position that's directly below yours. This would create what most people call a "conflict of interest," right? In fact, even under World Bank's own ethical guidelines, family members and significant others can't work in positions in which one person would be the supervisor of another.

So, Wolfowitz sent Riza off to the U.S. State Department, and on the way out, he gave her a $60,000 salary hike for her troubles. Whoops! Maybe he shouldn't have done that!

Wolfowitz helped write the book on neoconservatism, so he knows just what to do: (1) deny that there's anything nasty going on, and (2) turn the mirror back on the people making the allegations, smear them, and insist that they're just out to get you for being as cool as you are.

Ah, that may work in the United States, but at the grownups' table, that doesn't fly. A report released Monday by a World Bank Committee charged Wolfowitz with violating ethical rules, according to The New York Times:

The report charged that Mr. Wolfowitz broke bank rules and the ethical obligations in his contract, and that he tried to hide the salary and promotion package awarded to Shaha Ali Riza, his companion and a bank employee, from top legal and ethics officials in the months after he became bank president in 2005.

Okay, so he can't exactly get away with trying tactic no. 1, denying that there's anything wrong going on. I mean, he did give his girlfriend an extensive pay package, but he just did so after consulting the ethical committee, right? Oh, no, he didn't do that, either. Xavier Coll, World Bank's personnel director, said that he did not give approval to the pay package and, in fact, tried to cover up the salary increase. In fact, according to the report, Wolfowitz ignored recommendations that he recuse himself from the matter altogether. Furthermore, it is the very definition of "conflict of interest" for Wolfowitz himself to approve a pay increase for his partner.

Okay, okay, so that didn't work. Step number two: smear! As a neoconservative, you've got to make the people who disagree with you pay the price for daring to disagree with you. Your own ballsiness will serve as prima facie evidence that you're right, even if you're wrong. To whit, Wolfowitz took the affair into the Court of Public Opinion, saying Apr. 30 that he was the subject of "orchestrated leaks of false, misleading, incomplete and personal information." (As a veteran of the Bush administration, he knows what a strategic leak looks like!) He continued:

The goal of this smear campaign, I believe, is to create a self-fulfilling prophecy that I am an ineffective leader and must step down for that reason alone, even if the ethics charges are unwarranted. [...] I, for one, will not give in to such tactics. And I will not resign in the face of a plainly bogus charge of conflict of interest.

Take that, World Bank! This is all part of a vast, some-kind-of-wing conspiracy!

But, sadly, Wolfowitz is no longer dealing with the kiddie table. In its report, World Bank rebuked Wolfowitz for his public criticisms:

It is also troubling that some of the pronouncements made by Mr. Wolfowitz and by his counsel on his behalf involve attacks on the Board and a Board process which has been mandated by the Development Committee. The Group believes that pronouncements of this sort cannot be regarded as acceptable from any staff member under any circumstance, much less from the President of a global institution. It is the President's responsibility to impose discipline and good order, and to set an example that other staff should strive to emulate. The Group finds that Mr. Wolfowitz has not done so.

Sha-zam! This report must be troubling for Wolfowitz, who, after six years with the Bush administration, was used to being insulated from actual criticism. I wonder if, after all those years around yes-men, Wolfowitz actually started to believe some of the things he said?

President Bush has insisted this entire time that Wolfowitz has done nothing wrong and that he, Wolfowitz, retains the president's faith. (Maybe these two, Donald Rumsfeld, and Alberto Gonzales can all get jobs on the Titanic. Sinking? What sinking? Everything's fine!) Some European governments have insisted that they will not fund World Bank if Wolfowitz stays on as president. White House Press Secretary Tony Snow's attitude today was not as staid as the president's and vice president's had been: "Separately, at some point in the future there are going to be conversations about the proper stewardship of the World Bank. In that sense ... all options are on the table," he said, possibly indicating that a Wolfowitz ouster was both (1) a possibility and (2) that such an event wouldn't be challenged by the White House.

Posted by Mark at 4:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From The New York Times, an editorial criticizing the teaching of abstinence-only education, which, at best, is just as effective as contraceptive-based sex education. The federal government has required that, in order to receive federal funding for sex education, that education must be abstinence-based. NYT reports, "At least nine states, by one count, have decided to give up the federal matching funds rather than submit to dictates that undermine sensible sex education."

Next, Think Progress digs up the fact that, during the Bosnian War, then-Governor George W. Bush -- a presidential hopeful -- criticized President Clinton for not having a timetable for getting out of the war: "I think it’s also important for the president to lay out a timetable as to how long [troops] will be involved and when they will be withdrawn," Bush said in 1999. Today, President Bush vetoed a military spending bill because it contains a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. He reasons that, if a timetable is drawn up, terrorists will wait us out. He admitted last week in an interview on PBS's Charlie Rose that his only rationale for this oft-repeated conclusion was "just logic. [...] I mean, you say we start moving troops out. Don’t you think an enemy is going to wait and adjust based upon an announced timetable of withdrawal?”

Finally, CNN reports that Iraqi Prime Minster Nuri al-Maliki "has created an entity within his government that U.S. and Iraqi military officials say is being used as a smokescreen to hide an extreme Shiite agenda that is worsening the country's sectarian divide." It seems that the prime minister -- once a leader of anti-Saddam Shiite groups in Iraq -- may be using his official power to exercise vengeance (or something) against Sunnis. But it's not a civil war.

Posted by Mark at 3:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I got flack from Mike last year about a post in which I wrote that President Bush is quite stupid, uninterested in the world around him, and actively lied to the American people about the Iraq War. In a follow-up post, I wrote, "It's not that I disagree with the way the president has handled this war. It's that I disagree with the war itself; there is no "good" way to operate this war, since it shouldn't have happened to begin with." Today, Joshua Michah Marshall of Talking Points Memo explains Harry Reid's "war is lost" comment this way:

Frankly, the whole question is stupid. Or at least it's a very stilted way of understanding what's happening, geared to guarantee President Bush's goal of staying in Iraq forever. A more realistic description is President Bush's long twilight struggle to see just how far he can go into one brown paper bag.

[...]

It's a huge distortion to say that this means the war was 'lost'. It just means what the war supporters said would happen didn't happen. The premise was bogus. Like I said at the outset, the whole exercise is like getting trapped in a brown paper bag. You can keep going into the bag and into the bag and into the bag and never get out or change anything. Or you can just turn around and walk out of the bag.

To say the war is "lost" would be to say that it had a path from which it strayed. This is not the issue, as the war never had a path that was good and just, anyway.

Posted by Mark at 11:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Throughout the Cold War, the United States supported right-leaning dictators in South America for the simple reason that they weren’t communists. Sure, they may have engaged in horrible human rights abuses, put the welfare of the rich over that of the rest of the country, and violently squelched free speech, but at least they weren’t in league with the Soviet Union. Now, it appears, the ousted communists are coming home to roost.

Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa is the third Latin American socialist president to call for an expansion of his own powers. Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez was recently granted the ability to pass legislation by decree for the next eighteen months. Bolivian president Evo Morales has called for his country’s constitution to be re-written. Now, Correa wants to take the popular “re-write the constitution because the current constitution hinders my political ambitions” approach. When 57 legislators in the Ecuadorean congress objected last month to re-writing the constitution, Correa fired them. Earlier this week, Ecuador’s highest court overruled Correa and re-instated them.

A trend in Latin America is forming, and it is not a good one. Whenever a new president thinks he needs more power, he calls for the constitution to be re-written. Or, whenever rule of law fails for a president’s politics, he has the law re-written. Respect for the rule of law in Latin America doesn’t go very far. This is probably because Latin American countries have only had democracies since the 1980s, at the very earliest. Before then, military dictatorships – backed by the United States – were the norm. And the military dictatorships weren’t stable; lower generals, lusting for power, overthrew the country’s leader and instituted himself. That general, in turn, would be overthrown by another general. And so on.

But violent (or even non-violent) overthrow isn’t in vogue anymore in Latin America. So what is? Legal overthrow. Instead of using the military to force the country’s politics to behave in a particular way, Latin American leaders are using the law to force the country’s politics to behave in a particular way. Whatever the method, whether it’s re-writing the constitution or demanding extra powers, Latin American “presidents” are setting themselves up as de facto dictators.

The case of Andres Manuel López-Obrador (or “AMLO,” as he is affectionately known) is a telling one in the annals of Latin American democracy. In last year’s Mexican presidential race, Lopez-Obrador, of the socialist PRD, was pitted against Felipe Calderón of the more conservative PAN. Calderón won, but only very narrowly. López-Obrador immediately cried foul and demanded recounts, citing election fraud. There were recounts, and those recounts found that Calderón still won. In a country like the United States, with a 200-year history of democracy, the opposition might not like the result, but would have to live with that result nonetheless. (The case even went to Mexico’s election tribunal, which declared Calderón the winner. Does any of this sound familiar?)

AMLO and his supporters decried the ruling, insisting that there was fraud. Liberal critics in the United States similarly declared that there had been fraud, even though no one could cite an instance of the kind of systematic voter fraud that would have to happen in order to rig an election. (Compare this, for example, with the 2004 United States presidential race, in which many instances of systematic fraud were discovered.) Even independent vote-monitoring organizations couldn’t find any irregularities in the Mexican election. Nevertheless, AMLO and his supporters insisted that a conservative candidate could only win by fraud and AMLO vowed to set up his own parallel government in protest.

This is not how democracy works. AMLO vowed to raise such a ruckus in Mexico that no one would be able to do any government business. That’s great that he’s utilizing civil disobedience, but the government still has to operate. Did he think that stopping the government would make Calderón abdicate his position? Did he plan on stopping government for four years? In an election without irregularities, AMLO lost; it was time for him to suck it up and move on.

But, no; in what might be called the typical Latin American fashion, AMLO instead tried to “overthrow” Calderón, insisting that his tenure wasn’t legitimate. This begs the question: what would have happened if AMLO were elected president? Would he use force to get his way then, as well? In Latin American politics, if you don’t get your way, you don’t admit defeat and go home; instead, you try to use all the political machinery at your disposal to get your way. This includes even re-writing the constitution, if necessary. If that doesn’t work, would he have resorted to the old standby – namely, involving the military?

In Marbury v. Madison, the 1803 U.S. Supreme Court case that established judicial review, John Marshall determined that laws made by Congress are subordinate to the Constitution:

That the people have an original right to establish, for their future govern-ment, such principles as, in their opinion, shall most conduce to their own happiness, is the basis on which the whole American fabric has been erected. The exercise of this original right is a very great exertion; nor can it, nor ought it, to be frequently repeated. The principles, therefore, so established, are deemed fundamental. And as the authority from which they proceed is supreme, and can seldom act, they are designed to be permanent.

This original and supreme will organizes the government, and assigns to different departments their respective powers. It may either stop here, or establish certain limits not to be transcended by those departments.

The government of the United States is of the latter description. The powers of the legislature are defined and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the constitution is written. To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing, if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained? The distinction between a government with limited and unlimited powers is abolished, if those limits do not confine the persons on whom they are imposed, and if acts prohibited and acts allowed, are of equal obligation. It is a proposition too plain to be contested, that the constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it; or, that the legislature may alter the constitution by an ordinary act.

Between these alternatives there is no middle ground. The constitution is either a superior, paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts, and, like other acts, is alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it.

If the former part of the alternative be true, then a legislative act contrary to the constitution is not law: if the latter part be true, then written constitutions are absurd attempts, on the part of the people, to limit a power in its own nature illimitable.

Marshall correctly theorized that the Constitution is “a superior, paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means” so that it is not “alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it.” This is the only way that a democracy can function: with a supreme, unchangeable (at least, unchangeable as far as normal legislation goes) charter that forms the framework of the government. For two hundred years, the United States has functioned on the principle that our policies must conform to the Constitution. In Latin America, if a president’s policies and the constitution are in conflict, it is the constitution that must change. This leads to instability and ultimately undermines democracy, for if the constitution can be altered at any time, then the distinction between a democracy and a dictatorship has disappeared.

Correa’s justification for re-writing the constitution, according to The Sydney Morning Herald, is that the Ecuadorean congress has “too many vested interests in state companies and the judiciary.” But is there no better way to eliminate these interests than to re-write the constitution? At the end of the day, has democracy won a complete victory, or merely a short-term victory? What happens when the next president (and there have been six presidents in Ecuador in the last six years) decides he wants to re-write the constitution, too? Allowing a constitution to be as malleable as an ordinary law ultimately hurts a country, as it relegates the government to something that is not a long-lasting, durable institution, but something volatile that citizens are loathe to place their faith in.

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OAKLAND -- Once again, I will be spending St. Valentine's Day watching a documentary about The St. Valentine's Day Massacre. On Feb. 14, 1929, seven members of George "Bugs" Moran's North Side Gang were murdered by four members of Al Capone's South Side Gang at the SMC Cartage Co. warehouse in Chicago (the SMC Cartage Co. was a front for bootlegging operations; remember, this was still during prohibition). Moran's men thought they were getting some contraband hooch, but in fact they were being set up for a hit.

The St. Valentine's Day Massacre was the climax of the Chicago mob wars of the 1920s; after the horrific pictures of the massacre appeared in the papers the next day, the public decided it had had enough of mob violence.

Normally, I watch the Paul Sorvino-narrated History Channel special about this, but I don't have TV. The History Channel special is very thorough -- and about three hours long -- going back years before the Massacre into the history of Capone, Moran, and other various North Side Gang leaders. All I could find on Netflix was the hour-long Discovery Channel special, so I guess that will have to suffice.

Unattached for St. Valentine's Day? Come over and watch the massacre unfold! I'll fill you in on the stuff that the Discovery Channel special misses (like how "Bugs" Moran became the leader of the North Side Gang only because everyone else above him had been killed). You'll have to email me, since I've had to turn comments off again thanks to comment spam robots.

Ooh! Time permitting, we might be able to fit in a screening of The Untouchables, starring Kevin Costner as Eliot Ness, Robert De Niro as Al Capone, and Sean Connery as an Irish policeman.

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CARACAS, Venezuela -- Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez won a major battle for socialist dictatorships this week. The Venezuelan legislature granted Chavez sweeping power to enact policy by decree for the next 18 months.

Sure, socialism is great, but dictatorship -- which is the power being granted to Chavez -- is not. And it is never, ever okay to justify dictatorship by claiming that you're only working for the greater good, just as it is never ever okay to rescind freedom of speech or the press under the guise that it is somehow "better" for the country. Taking away rights in the name of freedom is not only ethically wrong, but it means that there is no freedom. History has taught us that the "dictatorship of the proletariat" -- which is what Chavez has created with his new decree powers -- doesn't end at a socialist utopia; rather, it ends with a crazy dictator and lots of dead people.

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OAKLAND -- A few months ago, I saw Tom Waits on The Daily Show. I had heard only the name, and I had no idea what kind of music he played. As it turns out, he's incredibly eclectic, having written and performed dozens of kinds of (mostly experimental) music over the last thirty years. At the end of the show, he played a tremendous version of "The Day After Tomorrow," from his last album.

Yesterday, I got a call from a friend who told me that three different local bands were playing Tom Waits songs on strange instruments at 21 Grand in Oakland. Would I like to go?

Of course!

At 8:30 PM (more or less), we arrived at 21 Grand, paid $10, and watched as three different bands -- all dressed in 1940s-era clothing -- played Tom Waits songs on ukelele, mandolin, kazoo, guitar, organ, and accordion. During one song, they simulated the crackling and popping noises of an old record by crinkling a plastic candy wrapper in front of the microphone. Brilliant! The only problem is that they didn't play my favorite song, "Eggs and Sausage," from his first album (back in 1970-something), Nighthawks at the Diner.

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Now that I have a Samson C01U USB condenser microphone, I plan to start offering podcasts on this blog.

People have suggested recording comedy bits and putting them up. Perhaps I'll do that. In any case, look for MP3s in this space in the near future.

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It's been a year since Ed's Whirlwind Tour of the West, when Elizabeth flew out to Denver and I moved to the Bay Area. On the way back from Denver, we stopped at a few places you might have heard of. They're only giant national parks. Elizabeth was relieved that I liked canyons, because that's a lot of what we saw.

My car just turned 20,000 miles yesterday. Fitting, since it turned 10,000 miles almost a year ago, on our way out of Bryce Canyon National Park.

Now, at last, you can view photos of Ed's Whirlwind Tour of the West as a Flickr set.

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OAKLAND, Ca. -- Upon the insistence of one of my co-workers, I went salsa dancing last night. There's a dance studio about five minutes from where I live, so I went to a beginner's salsa class. I soon discovered what my problem with dancing has always been: I'm easily confused when the steps get too intricate. It's frustrating to be doing something and then suddenly not know what it is you're supposed to be doing. By the end of the night, I was able to do the basic steps -- not sexily, but at least I could do them. As Jared pointed out, the more I do something that I've never done before, the more neural pathways I'll build for that task.

I'm waiting here for the guy from PG&E (the electric company) to come and light the pilot.

Oh, and guess where I'm going the evening of Dec. 9? To see a little guy called Gallagher at Cobb's Comedy Club! I told Jared about the good acts that come through Cobb's, and he went to the website. We were both flabbergasted to see that Gallagher was going to be there, and for only $30. Hells, yes I want to see Gallagher for $30! The only problem is that Cobb's lists this as a "no sledge or no mess" show. Crap! Why go to see Gallagher if he's not bringing the Sledge-O-Matic™? Well, I don't know how much longer Gallagher will be touring, so I figure I'd better see him while I can. And, besides, he has to at least end the show by smashing just one watermelon.

Things in O-Town are humming along. I will need to start rock climbing again so that I don't forget how.

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Must be between 5'4" and 5'9" tall, 19-27 years old, slim to average build, and attractive. Women only! With Elizabeth in Ecuador until February, I should try this "casual dating" thing. Here are some of the things my casual partner and I will do together:

• Go to the movies. I don't go to the movies all the time, but occasionally, I'll want to see a new film, and I'll want someone to come with me. Potential date must enjoy action-ey films (e.g. Casino Royale) as well as indie films (e.g. The Science of Sleep) and comedies (e.g. Borat). Date must also like Shakespeare, as I enjoy going to the California Shakespeare Festival in Orinda.
• Go out to dinner. I enjoy food, and there are lots of restaurants in this area. My date and I will go to restaurants every now and then.
• Rock climbing. I like rock climbing, and my date must, as well. I haven't been rock climbing recently because I have no belay partner. Date must be interested in rock climbing as well as hiking, camping, and going to national/state parks for the weekend.
• Discussion. I like to talk politics. Not a lot, but enough. Date must be able to keep up with political conversation and know what's going on in the news. I also like to talk about other things. Date must be able to bring some interesting intellectual background to discussion. Witiness appreciated. Some college education preferred. Liberal-leaning people only, please. Liberal-leaning people preferred, but conservative thinkers are also welcome.

If you know anyone that fits this description, please let me know. I'm at a loss in finding out where to meet new people.

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The Wall Street Journal is after Hugo Chavez. Last week, at a speech before the U.N. General Assembly, President Chavez repeatedly referred to President Bush as "the devil." He was congratulated on his speech by such credible figures as Robert Mugabe and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Problem is, I agree with this WSJ op-ed from Alvaro Vargas Llosa, a scholar at the Independent Institute, a right-wing think tank. This is not because I have a vendetta against Chavez for criticizing Bush. This is because Vargas Llosa's criticisms of Chavez are right on-target.

Vargas Llosa parallels Dante's Inferno -- which is about Dante's trip through the nine circles of hell -- with Chavez's own "Inferno." It is true that Chavez has no credibility to assume a higher moral standing than President Bush. While Chavez isn't guilty of starting a war in Iraq (which makes him pretty popular in some circles), neither is he guilty of supporting freedom of speech and the press. Chavez is known, as Vargas Llosa tells us, for pressuring national media companies to write nice things about him. People who protest against him -- or even write unflattering op-eds for national newspapers -- find themselves suddenly imprisoned. Chavez is not only bosom buddies with Fidel Castro, but also Cuba's secret police and spy networks.

As I've written before, this sort of crackdown on what we would call First Amendment rights is astonishing coming from a country that wants to be seen as a democracy. While Western democracies like France, England, and Spain (which are still among the dominant diplomatic powers in the world) certainly disagree with the United States on a number of things -- and have an equal disdain for Bush -- they will not high-five Chavez for his remarks. They are undoubtedly as perplexed by Chavez as some observers in the United States are, and I hope that they take a dim view of Chavez's human rights abuses and resist giving him any credibility in the world until he makes his country truly a democracy.

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Not everyone is an administrator

If you find yourself entering the workplace as someone who's not in the IT department, then you'll sooner or later come to the realization that you aren't an administrator on the computer you've been given. You can't install software. You can't change your settings. And it's all for the better. It also means less opportunity for you to mess something up.

But software manufacturers don't seem to understand that. They write software that requires you to be an administrator -- not only to install it in the first place, but also to run it at all. Software developers for the Mac platform have discovered that Mac has true multi-user support. For years, we had to deal with Windows, which had "users," but all those users were administrators by default. And Mac OS 9 had no such distinction. But now that we actually have software restrictions -- non-administrators just don't have write access to certain folders -- we need to invent software that doesn't rely on the outdated notion that the user is always an administrator.

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When Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela in 2000, not many people outside the Latin-American Studies circle noticed. In 2002, there was a coup, and the democratically-elected president was replaced. Within hours -- hours -- the Bush administration, which champions freedom and democracy, recognized the un-elected government. The coup lasted for only a few days, and Chavez was rightfully restored to power. The Bush administration suffered an embarrassment; it showed its hand too early, clearly demonstrating that it didn't much care for the Socialist president. It looked like we were heading back to the 1980s, when the U.S. government supported right-leaning dictators in Latin America (like, say, General Augusto Pinochet) instead of left-leaning, democratically-elected presidents (like, oh, President Salvador Allende).

Thankfully, the U.S. government didn't actually returned to its policy of providing weapons and cash to right-leaning paramilitary forces, allowing them to overthrow the elected leaders. (Well, except for Colombia, but that's been going on for a while now.)

This was my first introduction to Hugo Chavez. And we didn't see much of him for a while.

Then, he became bosom buddies with Cuban president Fidel Castro. Castro, of course, is not a "president" in the sense that he was ever elected. He sort of proclaimed himself head of state after the 1959 revolution that overthrew U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. Do two wrongs make a right? Some people seem to think so.

It looked as though Chavez was setting himself up to be the next power broker in the region. Castro has been old for some time, and he will need a successor. Certainly his brother, Raul Castro, will be his successor as head of state, but Raul lacks the charm and tenacity of Ol' Beardy. Thankfully, Chavez is more than up to the task of filling Castro's charm shoes.

But even though Chavez presided over attempts at equalizing the lower and upper classes in Venezuela, he did things that should bother liberal-thinking people. Reportedly, Chavez has no qualms about intimidating or even imprisoning his critics. No matter what your goals are as a leader, or how left-leaning you are, or how much you profess to love the poor, it is never okay to use government power to silence speech.

Last week, Chavez met with other leaders in a summit of the Non-Aligned Nations. These nations were formerly called "third world" nations because they were neither the first (capitalist) world nor the second (communist world). The summit was hosted in Cuba by Raul Castro, currently in charge of Cuba.

Guess who else hangs out at the summit of Non-Aligned Nations? President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for one. You'll remember that he's called the Holocaust a "myth" and suggested that Israel should be eradicated. These are both stupid things to say, and Ahmadinejad is stupid for saying them. But why would Chavez want to hang out with Ahmadinejad? It's definitely not good for P.R. Then again, why would Chavez want to hang out with Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe (who, a few years ago, seized white farmers' land in the name of revenge)? Or the Secretary of State of North Korea? Clearly, Chavez doesn't care about angering the United States with whom he associates. But, if he wants credibility from other countries in Latin America and the rest of the world, he needs to stop hanging out with crazies.

Because, clearly, the crazies are starting to affect him. Today, Chavez spoke to the United Nations General Assembly. Taking a page out of the Ayatollah Kohmeini playbook, Chavez called President Bush a "devil" several times, remarking of Bush's visit to the UN yesterday, "It still smells of sulphur today."

Even on NPR, that most liberal of forums (unless you talk to liberals, who don't think it's liberal enough), the resident U.N. expert had difficulty believing that Chavez actually called Bush a "devil." It's just not something that's done there.

Does Chavez expect the world to take him seriously? He also took the time to call the U.N. "worthless," echoing the sentiments of what is apparently his new friend, President Ahmadinejad, who called the U.N. "neither [...] legitimate nor effective."

President Ahmadinejad is clearly not someone the West would enjoy being diplomatic with. Ever since the Shah was overthrown in 1979, Iran has been ruled as an oppressive Islamic theocracy. (I mean, the Shah was no treat, but at least his was a secular oppression.)

Is this indeed Chavez's new buddy? Will he indeed team up with Ahmadinejad, Mugabe, and Kim Jong-Il -- the latter three comprising the Coalition of the Oppressive and Deranged? Chavez will never be taken seriously by anyone if he insists on associating with dictators, and he will most likely lose the respect of other legitimate democracies in South America. Even though he's challenging U.S. power, which is not in itself bad, he's going about it entirely the wrong way.

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I've been thinking about security recently, as a result of the foiled London terrorist plots. Many techie websites have been making fun of Britain's and the United States' stringent regulations prohibiting certain types of liquids in carry-on luggage and on your person. Security expert Bruce Schneier says that the only effective way to prevent terrorism is to practice what he calls "anti-terrorism"; that is, don't give in to the terrorists' desire to create chaos and paranoia, ultimately leading to citizens lobbying their government for a change in policy so as to eliminate the terrorist threat. The terrorist's goal is to inspire fear in his or her victims.

This is Schneier's argument, and I've been thinking about it. I like Bruce Schneier; he says a lot of intelligent things about security. But while has considered terrorism as an attempt to instill fear, uncertainty, and doubt (what online types call "FUD"), I don't think he's considered another part of the picture: terror as a publicity stunt.

Mark Jurgensmeyer calls this "theater of terror." In addition to attempting to instill fear in their victims, terrorists will engage in acts that will garner a lot of media attention, focusing the public eye on their cause. Osama bin Laden is considered a master of "theater of terror," as he expertly crafts his own media image so as to portray himself as a single-minded religious militant (have you ever noticed how all of his self-released videos show him brandishing or sitting hear a Kalashnikov assault rifle? Or wearing a camoflauge-colored vest?)

Why do terrorists kidnap high-profile people? Why did terrorists kidnap and behead Americans in Iraq? The only fear it instilled was on the part of family members of the victims; everyone else just avoided traveling to Iraq and the problem was solved. Inspiring FUD requires terrorists to plant in their victims' minds that they could be attacked at any second, no matter where they live. Beheadings were a publicity stunt -- a high-profile action designed to get some demands met. (When terrorists kidnapped journalist Jill Caroll, they wanted something in return for her. Kidnappings aren't just for funsies; there's a pragmatic purpose behind them.)

Schneier has routinely failed to come up with pragmatic security responses to terrorism. In his article, linked above, he says, "[O]ur job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches." This is a wonderful idealistic goal for the future -- and one that we should continue to work toward -- but it doesn't speak to what can be done right now. This is not policy, which demands a tangible response -- not a politicized response or one designed to take away our rights (for Schneier seems to believe that any pragmatic response must a priori be designed to take away our rights and instill fear in us so that politicians can gain more control). Imagine that you are the police chief in a city where there has been a rash of burglaries. What if your response to the burglaries were, "Well, we need to enact better social welfare programs in order to create less of an incentive for people to burglarize." Yes, indeed that's a wonderful idea, but, concurrently, there are other things you can do to catch burglars who are, after all, breaking the law. If your only response to this situation were to call for the beginning of a long-term solution, your constituents -- who live in the short-term and don't want to continue to be robbed in the mean time -- would vote you out of office or call for your impeachment.

If heightened security is a knee-jerk reaction to terrorism, then scoffing at heightened security is a knee-jerk reaction to heightened security. This situation plays out day after day on the Internet, at techie websites where contributors and their commenters laugh at the silliness of security.

But is it really silly? What is the other option? If you scoff, then you must believe that there is a better way to go about security. If so, what is your plan?

Today, I read this horror story about an iPod stuck in an airplane toilet that caused the plane to be diverted to Canada due to terrorist threat. Commenters scoffed at the outlandishness of the response to an iPod stuck in a toilet. And, indeed, it's a pretty ridiculous situation. But what if it weren't merely an iPod? What if it were really a bomb? Schneier knows enough about social engineering that he should be leery of scoffing immediately. A good terrorist would play off the iPod as though he accidentally dropped it in the toilet, and then -- kaboom! It's a "you're damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario. On the one hand, when security is too tight, we condemn it as such. On the other hand, if security were too lax, and the iPod-in-the-toilet really were a bomb, we would lambast security officials for not working hard enough, or not taking the situation seriously enough. Schneier calls this story "[o]verreaction at its worst." An iPod full of C4 might not destroy the entire plane, but it would certainly do a good job of seriously damaging it, causing it to crash, or, at the very least, getting attention with its carnage.

What is the alternative? This is the problem with terrorism: it does create paranoia, such that every situation that is potentially a terrorist threat must be treated as though it were a terrorist threat. And why not? What was wrong with the security officials' reaction to this incident? Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20; it's quite easy for us to deride their responses as silly and overblown, now that we know that the iPod was not a bomb. But imagine being a security official, or a pilot, or a stewardess, charged with the safety of the people on board that plane, as well as your own life. Would you really take the risk that it's not a bomb? Would you believe a person who claims that it's just an iPod that he dropped in the toilet? How would you know that person isn't just using social engineering to get you to drop your defenses?

I submit that, in order for us to have a serious talk about security, we need to stop automatically deriding security. We need to talk about what we can do in the long-term, yes, but more importantly, we need to talk about what measures we can take right now to ensure that people aren't killed or injured while our long-term measures are taking effect.

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RINCÓN DE GUAYABITOS, Mexico -- Elizabeth and I went on vacation to Mexico for a week, and it was fantastic. Neither of us had been to Mexico before, but we both spoke Spanish, so we figured it would be okay. We arranged to stay at a bed and breakfast operated by Bob Howell, a retired US Marine who lives in the small, seaside town of Rincón de Guayabitos, about an hour north of the tourist destination Puerto Vallarta. Bob doesn't charge very much: $50 per day to stay in a nice room with a king-sized bed, private bathroom, and balcony. Breakfast is also provided every day at 9 AM, prepared by his bed-and-breakfast business associate, Vicky, who really is indigenous Mexican.

We got into the airport in Puerto Vallarta at about 6 PM on Saturday, July 29, after getting up at 4 AM to catch a 6 AM flight out of Oakland. We learned from the website that Bob and Vicky also do humanitarian work down there. The $350 we paid last week didn't merely pay for the upkeep of the house; it also went into allowing them to distribute medical supplies down there.

We pretty much relaxed and walked on the beach Saturday night. We enjoyed some of Bob's margaritas, which are singularly amazing, and for which he has won several margarita-making contests. It rained in the evening, which is something we were dreading, but since it's about 90 degrees -- with humidity -- at dusk, the rain was actually cooling. We stayed in Mexico during the rainy season, and during the rainy season, it will pour for a few hours every day, and then stop. There are tremendous thunderstorms at night, too.

Sunday morning, Bob and Vicky drove us around the area and showed us what there was to see and do. Also, there was history. You see, after the Mexican Revolution, the old hacienda system -- with its thousands of acres and peasants -- was tossed out. The peasants became farmers who lived and worked in commune-style communities. While this was great for the farmers, it was bad for progress. The Mexican government bought the area of Guayabitos from the farmers about thirty years ago and developed it into a vacation destination. The beach is lined with "resorts" and hotels which contain bungalows, which are hotel rooms with kitchenettes inside. By and large, Guayabitos is where Mexicans go to vacation. Cancún, Alcapulco, Cabo San Lucas, and Puerto Vallarta are largely for gringos (white non-Spanish speakers, most frequently Americans, but also a hefty share of Canadians). Most Mexicans can't afford the American prices of resorts in those other towns, so they come to places like Guayabitos, where a swank bungalow at a nice hotel costs 500 pesos (a little less than $50) per night. As a result, we didn't encounter a single person who spoke actual English, other than the other Americans and Canadians who have moved to Guayabitos and now call it home.

And there are lots of them! One restaurant where we ate, Ricardo's, is located on Highway 200 and is the only place in town to get pizza. It's operated by Americans. Another place, whose name escapes me, is on Highway 200 and scarcely a quarter-mile from Ricardo's. It's actually a German restaurant operated by an actual German woman who now lives in Guayabitos. Still another non-Mexican restaurant is J&M's Place, located on the beach, which is operated by an American couple (and while the woman sounds like she's from Minnesota, her husband is from Transylvania). Eating at J&M's Place one night, we actually met all the other American restaurant owners we had seen during the week and had a very long conversation with the German woman about owning and operating a business in Mexico.

On Sunday, we began our many trips to the beach. The water on the beach at Guayabitos is about eighty degrees; it's like swimming in the bathtub. We spent hours down there with our boogie boards, soaking in the tropical sun, and getting sand everywhere.

Monday, we visited Tepic, the capital city of Nayarit, the state in which Guayabitos is located. Mexico is divided into thirty-some states, just like the United States, and each state has its own capital (in fact, Mexico's official name is Estados unidos de Mexico, the United States of Mexico). Public transporation in Mexico is much more advanced than in the United States, mostly because it has to be. Most Mexicans can't afford cars, so they have to take public transportation. As a result, Mexican transportation -- as in Europe -- is frequent and cheap. A 3-hour ride from Guayabitos to Tepic in an air-conditioned coach cost 200 pesos (about $20) each. Once we got to Tepic, taking the bus around the city cost 4 pesos (40 cents) each.

I've got an idea for a theme park ride. Picture the Indiana Jones Adventure at Disneyland, which is a dangerous "off-road" ride in a Jeep-style vehicle through an abandoned South American temple filled with spears, bats, fire, and rickety bridges over huge chasms. Now picture the same ride, but instead of a South American temple, you're in Tepic. I call this ride "Mexican Bus." City buses in Tepic come about every five minutes, which is good. The problem is stopping them once you're on them. The bus drivers go very fast and stop at stop signs only when other vehicles won't stop for them. Stop signs are more of a recommendation than a requirement. "If there's cross-traffic, stop. If not, go right on through without slowing down." And when the bus does stop, it stops immediately, decelerating in a heartbeat and causing your heart to skip a few beats.

Tepic has probably around 50,000 people, and about six of them are American. I have never been stared at as much in my life as when I was in Tepic. People would walk by us and then turn around and look again. One girl looked at us out of a window, then turned around, tugged on her brother's shirt, and brought him to the window to stare, too. Elizabeth and I were a novelty in a sea of mostly indigenous people. The Spanish never really conquered the Guayabitos area, and as a result, there are few mestizos here. Many of the people are full-blooded Indian, and they rarely, if ever, see white people. A girl and her two friends -- all about ten years old -- kept running by us as we sat in the plaza, giggling the whole time, and then running back.

While in Tepic, we went to a few museums and learned about the native populations in the area: the Huicholes, the Copas, and the Mexicaneros. Most of the people in the area are Huichole Indians. We also learned about los niños heroes, military academy cadets who attempted to fight off U.S. forces in The War of Northern Invasion (Mexico's name for what the U.S. calls The Mexican War). We also learned about Amado Nervo, a very famous Mexican poet who we had never heard of before, who hails from Tepic. His museum is located in his childhood home, which is pretty cool.

On Tuesday, we rested by the beach.

On Wednesday, we went horseback riding. For 200 pesos each ($20), we could ride horses up into the hills around Guayabitos, and then ride them back down. The whole trip took two hours, and was infinitely cheaper than anything to be had in the United States. Pretty much all Mexicans have heard of San Francisco, even if they've never been there. Our horse guide, making small talk with us at the top of the hill while the horses rested, told us that he had visited Los Baños, which is sort of near San Francisco (about two hours south).

Wednesday started interestingly when Vicky got an emergency request from Maria Eugenia, their domestic employee. (Everyone in Mexico who can afford them have paid servants, whether maids, gardners, or whatever. Labor is cheap, so a lot of Mexicans pay people to clean up the house or garden.) Maria Eugenia lives in a small town just down Highway 200 called Puerta de la lima. Right near her house, a woman gave birth to another baby two days ago. Bob and Vicky give $40 care packages to new mothers, which include things like cradles, bottles, diapers, and other things that people in the very, very poor village of Puerta de la lima couldn't afford or wouldn't spend money on. Maria Eugenia's husband makes 120 pesos a day -- that's $12 -- and that's considered adequate to live in this village with dirt roads and one-room brick cottages with corrugated tin roofs.

On Thursday, we went to the island in the middle of Jaltemba Bay, called la isla de Maria. The island is made of coral, so there was a lot of neat coral stuff to be had. Vicky told us that there was a restaurant on the island, which is sort of true. There used to be a full-service restaurant on the top of the island, but it has since closed. The kitchen and tables and chairs remain up there, like a sort of ghost restaurant. The only "restaurant" on the island is a small palapa that serves ceviche. You encounter a lot of palapas on the beach. "Palapa" is the Spanish word for a thatched-roof cottage (though, thankfully, none of the ones in Guayabitos had been burninated), and many of these beachside restaurants are constructed in the fashion of an open-air thatched-roof style. "Ceviche" is a sort of salsa made with onions, tomatoes, cilantro, peppers, and your choice of either shrimp or fish. It's put on a tostada, a small, flat corn tortilla that has been fried until it's hard, kind of like a big, round tortilla chip.

One of the great things about Mexico is the salsa. American salsa is tomato-based, with an actual-factual tomato paste base along with big pieces of seasoned tomato. Some other vegetables are added, but it's largely a tomato production. This results in a very watery salsa that's heavy on tomatoes. Mexican salsa, by contrast, contains no liquid. It's made entirely of diced vegetables, and equal weight is given to all vegetables; tomatoes aren't the star. Mexican salsa cotnains onions, tomatoes, peppers, as well as cilantro, cucumbers, and avocadoes.

For dinner on Thursday, we ate at J&M's Place, where, as I said, we met the other American restaurant owners we saw during the week. The German woman -- whose restaurant I highly, highly recommend, as it's delicious -- is named Beatra. She told us all about Mexico, and how it is to run a business down there. Apparently, many Americans get a Mexican business partner to help them, since until recently it was fairly difficult for foreigners to own businesses. The problem with this was that, once the business was profitable, the Mexican owner could fire the American partner and take the whole business for himself. Beatra said that she took the time to start a business the "right" way -- which was to file a lot of paperwork, but in the end, she is the full owner of the business.

Friday, we spent our last day in Mexico -- well, our last non-airport-day -- by the beach. That evening, we went to Vista Guayabitos, the swankiest restaurant in town. (Keep in mind that the swankiest restaurant in town costs you $30 for a dinner for two.) Elizabeth ordered some shrimp dish, and I saw red snapper on the menu and thought, "Ooh! That looks good!" When they brought out the food, they didn't bring me just a filet of red snapper -- they brought me the whole damn fish! There it was, a red snapper -- the whole red snapper -- seasoned, grilled, and tossed onto a plate, fins, skin, and all, staring at me with eyes that had been reduced to jelly by the grill. I stared at it for a second, wondering what I should do, and then I decided to eat it. And it was pretty good, but it was also pretty unnerving, watching your food as it watches you.

The next morning, Bob gave me about two pounds of Mexican coffee beans that he got from the people up in the mountains who actually grow the coffee. In San Francisco's climate, he said, the beans would stay fresh for up to ten years. The problem with commercial coffee is that it is already bad when you buy it. Once you roast the coffee beans, they're fresh for days. Once you grind the beans, they're fresh for minutes! Thus, the true coffee fanatic will purchase raw beans, roast them a day before grinding them, and then grind them just before making coffee. If any of you are interested in getting your own beans when you go to Mexico, you can take up to fifty pounds of beans with you without an import license.

And so ended our week in Mexico. And what of Mexico? The wealthy are pretty wealthy, the poor are truely impoverished. In some places, like Puerta de la lima, it's true poverty -- these people don't make nearly enough money to survive, and chances are slim that they will get out of there. In Guayabitos, there's a lot of garbage in the streets and the roads aren't very good, but that's a problem of government services. Mexico has no long tradition of the government providing infastructure services. In the United States, we feel entitled to infastructure provided by the local and state governments, and to some extent, the federal government, as well. There is no entitlement in Mexico. Except for Tepic, which is the capital city of the state, the other cities are pretty much on their own. Individual cities -- and even individual neighborhoods -- are left to fend for themselves. Bob is a member of a homeowners association in Guayabitos that gets work done for themselves because no one else will do it. They purchased a bulldozer and had volunteers clean garbage off the streets. They took some of their own money and built a bridge over the large creek separating Guayabitos and La peñita de Jaltemba, the next closest town. Prior to the building of the bridge, people had to use the highway to get to La Peñita, and it resulted in fifty deaths in five years. So, the homeowners association had to take up the charge themselves to do something about it. The Mexican government is getting better; it's providing more services, and the major highways between cities are in excellent condition.

The way Vicky describes Mexico in the past, it sounds like the Soviet Union. You had to know someone in the government if you wanted something done; taking official channels was inefficient and usually led to dead ends. As one Mexican travel book notes, money "can open up a lot of doors that were previously closed." In the past, public officials demanded morditas (literally, "little bites") if you wanted them to do anything. Sometimes, customs and immigration officials would demand a bribe if you wanted to enter the country. It's gotten better in the last several years, partly because Vincente Fox wanted to be a friend to the United States, and one of the good things that came of that was an attempt to crack down on corruption. Still, though, everyone agrees that Mexico is, socially and technologically, where the United States was fifty years ago, but it's getting better. And if you have the chance, you should visit to see for yourself.

Posted by Mark at 3:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From now on, if you wish to leave a comment, you must register with TypeKey. TypeKey prevents unauthorized persons from leaving comments and will hopefully stop comment spam and will stop spam robots from taking my site down. The upshot is that, once you're a trusted commenter, your comments will appear immediately. Please note that this sign-in system is for security and not for a silly reason, like The New York Times' registration requirements, which I believe are based on marketing.

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Comment spam attacks have twice shut down my website, and as such, I've disabled commenting for now, pending figuring out how to keep comment spam robots from overwhelming this site.

Also, I'll be in Mexico from July 29 to Aug. 7, so if you send me email, I probably won't read it until next week, and if you call me, I probably won't return your phone call, as it's expensive to answer calls in foreign countries (thanks, Verizon).

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Seriously, Israel. You're psychotic.

So, Hezbollah soldiers in Lebanon kidnap two Israeli soldiers. I think we can all agree that that's bad and something should be done about it. But Israel, still in the mindset that the world is out to get it (which is largely true in the Middle East), does what it usually does in instances like this: it goes bat-shit insane, sending its (U.S.-provided) jets into enemy territory, blowing up cities, killing civilians, and giving Arabs all the more reason to hate it. This is what we in the business call a "cycle."

But, thankfully, up until now, they've only been blowing up Lebanese, and over here in the west, we can't even spell "Lebanese," so we don't care. But we do care about Canadians! Yes, seven Canadian citizens were killed by Israel randomly, madly flinging bombs into the air.

This is not to say that Israel shouldn't defend itself. Many groups -- and even some countries -- hate Israel (including our friend over in Iran) and would like to see it explode. But Israel's response to attacks upon it are waaay beyond retaliation, and this is not a new thing. A Palestinian blows up a restaurant; the Israeli Air Force levels his home village. Is this really conducive to anything but causing more violence? When Israel starts accidentally killing people who had nothing to do with a particular terrorist attack, it breeds more terrorists! Israel hasn't run afoul of foreign governments, I don't think, until now: a western government has had some of its citizens killed by Israel. If it had been the United States, everything would be okay. No matter what Israel does, the United States is behind them, one hundred percent. But the rest of the world isn't the same way and they won't watch Israel gulp down crazy pills as we will.

This is where the film Munich is valuable. Directed by Stephen Spielberg -- a Jew, by the way -- the film presents a nuanced opinion of Israel's penchant for bloodthirsty revenge. The character of Golda Meir even understands that going out and killing the people who planned the Munich massacre won't stop terrorism; all it will do is send the message that you shouldn't screw Israel. And that's a great message -- if this is junior high school. "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values," she says, rationalizing the killing of people as necessary. In the end, Spielberg's film comes out on the side of not taking revenge. Not only does revenge not work as a security method -- unless your plan is to kill every last one of your enemies, as well as their descendants -- but it psychologically turns us into the people we hate. Now, if you can deal with that, then good for you: you now have the mental equipment to become a professional assassin.

Israel is on permanent defensive. Like a person who has had nothing but bad things happen to him his entire life, Israel reacts to every comment and every action as though it is a personal attack, and sends the most missiles it can at whoever made the comment or action. Israel still lives in fear of the Holocaust, and it is this fear that prompts it to act in this way. There will be no peace in the Middle East as long as (1) other countries continue to hate Israel, and (2) Israel continues these totally-out-of-proportion retaliatory tactics.

Posted by Mark at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Al Gore's recent film An Inconvenient Truth has re-ignited the debate over global warming. Today, Slashdot posted a link to an article from Canada Free Press criticizing Gore's film.

One of the article's sources, a climatologist from Canada, says that one of the problems with Gore's film is that his experts are not climatologists:

Even among [the small fraction of scientists who actually work in the field of climate study], many focus their studies on the impacts of climate change; biologists, for example, who study everything from insects to polar bears to poison ivy. "While many are highly skilled researchers, they generally do not have special knowledge about the causes of global climate change," explains former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball. "They usually can tell us only about the effects of changes in the local environment where they conduct their studies."

On the other side of the coin, we have a 2004 article from Science magazine (also linked from Slashdot), which analyzed 928 scientific papers regarding climate change:

The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

The "consensus position," according to Science, is articulated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which states that human beings are modifying atmospheric constituents through the emission of "greenhouse gases," and that the increase in the Earth's temperature is due to these emissions. According to Science, we have a theory with two parts. The first part is an observation: the Earth's temperature is fluctuating now in a way that is different from how it fluctuated 50 years ago. The second part is a hypothesis about this observation: humans, through greenhouse gas emissions, are causing this temperature fluctuation.

Like evolution, global warming is a theory. Unlike evolution, there are global warming opponents even within the scientific community. (Within the scientific community, there is no one who doesn't believe that evolution exists; only outside of the scientific community is there skepticism.) The scientists who suggest that there's no such thing as global warming and that it's just a figment of everyone's imagination are most likely in the employ of multinational corporations which would benefit from looser emission restrictions. The scientists who are not affiliated with corporations or foundations, but are still skeptics, are of the opinion that we don't yet know enough about global warming to say whether or not humans are having an effect, let alone whether or not there is an effect. Accurate temperature records go back about one hundred years -- a fraction of a second in geologic time, which operates on a scale of millions of years -- but scientists have developed new ways of extracting core samples from ice caps to see how they have melted and re-frozen over the course of thousands of years.

What, then, is the truth regarding global warming? In the face of more convincing evidence, the answer appears to be, "We're not sure." Air pollution is visible outside our windows, but is this pollution causing a global climate change? And if humans are causing climate change in a negative way, is the change as dire as Al Gore might make it out to be?

Posted by Mark at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here in sunny California, today is the primary election, in which most people will be voting for candidates for their parties -- if they're registered with a party -- and ballot initiatives. A few lucky people will get to decide on real offices, like the mayor of Oakland. I was one of those lucky people.

How fitting that, a week ago, Rolling Stone published a feature story penned by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., titled "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" regarding the degree to which the Bush administration stole the 2004 election.

I have written in this space before that Bush did not steal the 2000 election; that was the by-product of poor litigation and jurisprudence all around. The 2004 election, however, was stolen by the Bush administration. In 2000, it was an issue of ambiguous ballot-counts: by some calculations, Gore would have won another recount. By other calculations, Bush would still have won. (Don't try and tell me that according to this one particular esoteric thing you read from some Democratic apologist, Gore definitely would have won; that's a pile of baloney. The truth is that we'll never know definitively.)

2004 was a different story, however, especially in Ohio, the tie-breaking state. Kennedy and some co-authors report that massive voter fraud occurred in Ohio, and the worst part of it that the fraud was perpetrated by Secretary of State (and Bush re-election committee co-chairman) J. Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell, a fervent Republican, did everything in his power (and some things outside of his power) to disenfranchise voters who might vote Democrat. The number of disenfranchised voters (and I use the word "disenfranchise" in its literal and correct meaning -- "denied the right to vote") was more than the margin separating Bush and Gore in Ohio.

Some fun facts from the story:

• "In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots."
• "According to the Conyers report, a team of twenty-five GOP volunteers calling themselves the Mighty Texas Strike Force holed up at the Holiday Inn in Columbus a day before the election, around the corner from the headquarters of the Ohio Republican Party -- which paid for their hotel rooms. The men were overheard by a hotel worker ''using pay phones to make intimidating calls to likely voters'' and threatening former convicts with jail time if they tried to cast ballots."
• "According to a statistical analysis conducted in May by the nonpartisan Greater Cleveland Voter Coalition, 16,000 voters in and around the city were disenfranchised because of data-entry errors by election officials, and another 15,000 lost the right to vote due to largely inconsequential omissions on their registration cards. Statewide, the study concludes, a total of 72,000 voters were disenfranchised through avoidable registration errors -- one percent of all voters in an election decided by barely two percent."

Additionally, the article details attempts by GOP operatives to discourage people from voting, illegal decrees from Secretary of State Blackwell that were designed to make it extremely difficult to register to vote or get a provisional or absentee ballot (including the enforcement of an archaic law requiring that voting applications not printed on eighty-pound card stock be rejected). GOP illegality ran the gamut from discouraging voters from coming to the polls by intimidation or creating long lines all the way to altering or destroying voter registration information.

Want to be more outraged? While Ohio state courts have, time and again, ruled these actions illegal, the point that Kennedy makes is that it is too little, too late: the election is over, and people are in office. Because Blackwell is in charge of state elections, there have been no investigations into this blatant corruption. Angry voters, aware of Blackwell's complicity in the theft of the 2004 election in Ohio, succeeded in getting an amendment to the state constitution placed on last November's ballot that would require future elections to be administered by an independent commission rather than the Secretary of State.

The amendment failed, however, and Blackwell is still in charge of elections; indeed, he intends to run for governor when Bob Taft's term expires in November. We've seen how he games the system when other people are running for office; how corrupt will this year's elections be when Blackwell himself is on the chopping block? Blackwell is even more conservative than current governor Taft, by the way. Taft did not endorse 2004's constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage because it could be construed to outlaw heterosexual common-law marriages, as well. Blackwell championed the whole thing and even boasts on his website that he "championed the passage of Issue 1, the Ohio Marriage Amendment in 2004."

Bob Taft began the project of destroying Ohio, and now Kenneth Blackwell would like to finish the job.

Posted by Mark at 5:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Remember Ward Churchill?

Back in 2001, University of Colorado at Boulder professor Ward Churchill -- who is not a Cherokee -- wrote an essay in which he condemned the victims of the World Trade Center attacks as "little Eichmans" and suggested that they deserved their fate. In keeping with his crazy communist mindset, he later said that his statements were "obviously not directed to the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by killed in the 9-1-1 attack," as though the fact that the latter group were working class and not "technicians," as he calls the middle-class employees of the World Trade Center, made them somehow exempt from guilt, all the while refusing to acknowledge that investment bankers themselves might not be guilty of anything, nor that working-class people are just as important as investment bankers in keeping Churchill's semi-mythological capitalist machine running.

Anyway, a UC Boulder committee released a report yesterday saying that Churchill had committed "academic misconduct" in his scholarly work, that among this were "plagiarism, misrepresentation of facts and fabrication of scholarly work." Churchill's lawyers said, predictably, that "the investigation was retaliation for the essay." Or, maybe, Churchill was obscure enough before the essay that his plagiarism fell under the radar of academia, and only after he became a controversial figure did people go back to his work and try to find misconduct. Sure, they may have re-checked his work because of his essay-gained notoriety, but a substantiated charge of plagiarism means just that: he probably committed plagiarism.

Score one for freedom

Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker rejected an attempt by AT&T to bar the public from a hearing dealing with a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation over whether or not AT&T broke the law in freely giving customer phone records to the NSA. Boy, that was a lot of prepositions.

In the hearing today, the same judge ruled that secret leaked AT&T documents, which might contain "trade secrets," could be used as evidence in the case, but they would still remain under seal until it could be determined whether or not they actually contain trade secrets. AT&T had been trying to get the judge to throw out the documents as evidence on the grounds that they contained trade secrets. The government has filed a brief asking the judge to -- surprise! -- dismiss the case.

The San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation alleges that AT&T violated the Telecommunications Act of 1934, among other laws, by freely giving consumer information to the NSA without a court order or warrant.

Is this really in Georgia?

Wow. In Georgia, of all places, a judge struck down the state's new gay marriage amendment on technical grounds.

Judge Constance C. Russell said that the amendment, as put before voters, violated a Georgia state law requiring that each amendment put before voters deal with only one subject. Georgia's gay marriage amendment proposal "defined marriage as between a man and a woman, banned same-sex civil unions and said that same-sex unions performed in other states would not be recognized." From the NYT article:

"People who believe marriages between men and women should have a unique and privileged place in our society may also believe that same-sex relationships should have some place, although not marriage," the judge wrote. "The single-subject rule protects the right of those people to hold both views and reflect both judgments by their vote."

The RIAA is awful

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a cartel composed of the major music-distribution labels, filed a lawsuit yesterday against XM Satellite Radio, contending that XM's new Inno device allows users to store songs in memory, which is apparently a violation of some law the RIAA made up yesterday. According to Reuters, the RIAA is seeking "$150,000 in damages for every song copied by XM customers using the devices." XM has 6.5 million subscribers and plays 160,000 songs per month. If just 10% of subscribers bought an Inno earlier this month, and each of them recorded just one song, that means that the RIAA is demanding $97.5 billion from XM.

That amount looks like this: $97,500,000,000. It's spelled like this: ninety-seven billion, five hundred million dollars. Only in the Ectjylop dimension, where dogs have humans as pets and Paris Hilton is the unquestioned dictator of the galaxy, would a judge ever allow that request to stand. Also, as per the 1984 case Sony v. Universal, "time-shifting" is not an infringement of copyright. In our dimension, we call that extortion. Thankfully, XM will not give in to the RIAA's strong-arm tactics and has vowed to "vigorously defend this lawsuit on behalf of consumers."

That's all the news I can find on my lunch break. See you next time!

Posted by Mark at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The San Francisco Examiner reports today that state Sen. Sheila Kuehl is introducing a bill that would require "textbooks and other social science materials to discuss contributions that gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people have made to the state and nation's economy, politics and society."

Kuehl's supporters maintain that "discussions of gays and lesbians are almost nonexistent in current textbooks." Kuehl herself says that a lack of GLBTs in state history gives the impression "that only white, straight men did anything important. That leaves virtually everyone else in school believing their talents may not be sufficient."

Since when is history about making people feel good about themselves? If that were the case, then the first two hundred years -- at least -- of American history would have to be obliterated from school curricula, since the actions of European settlers toward Native Americans and Africans isn't so good for the self-esteem.

Unfortunately, it just so happens that, with few exceptions, white men did do all the important things in U.S. history. Is this because they were better than non-white non-men? No, it was because they were in power, and anyone who was not a white man didn't have the power to do much of anything, other than be subjugated. There are notable exceptions -- Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, Abigail Adams, and so on -- but they are the exception rather than the rule. That's for one.

Second, race has existed as a concept for as long as our nation has. It's not hard to find exceptions to the white man thing because it's easy to define "white" and "man." As a result, it's also easy to define "non-white" and "non-man."

It's a lot harder to dredge up information about homosexual founders of our country, partially because the idea of homosexuality has changed so much over even the last two hundred years. Homosexuality existed, certainly; however, it would be historically inaccurate to interpret two hundred-year-old concepts of sexuality from the vantage point of today. We might ask, "Did the important historical figure have a concept of gender or sexuality that differed from his or her culture's predominant view of gender or sexuality?"

My concern is that we will have to go far and wide to dredge up -- with all the connotations of that verb -- information about marginal historical figures who are important not for what they did, but because of their sexual orientation. My other concern is that we will deceive children into believing that cultural ideas of gender and sexuality are static; that is, the way we interpret gender and sexuality are the same as they were two hundred years ago, or even longer. If we were to sit down with Aristotle or Plato and calmly explain to them our understanding of homosexuality and pedophilia and then tell them that they are both homosexuals and pedophiles, they would certainly be confused by our understanding of homosexuality and our aversion to pedophilia. Interpreting the past from a future reference point does a disservice to the past. In economics, we must compare today's dollars to the real value of yesterday's dollars. So, too, in history must we adjust our interpretations to comport with the past. Just because Oscar Wilde had sex with a man doesn't mean that he would -- or we should -- consider himself "gay" in the contemporary sense. It's a common modern misconception to interpret the "fop" characters of Restoration theatre as homosexuals. This is wrong, as our meaning of "homosexual" is not in line with the intention of the Restoration playwright, and to interpret such a character from a modern point of view imposes upon the work a modern paradigm that did not exist in the 1660s. This can lead to a whole host of misinterpretations.

(For another rant about modern misinterpretations of classic works, read any postcolonial interpretation of The Tempest and then talk to me later.)

Sen. Kuehl's bill is well-intentioned -- it's designed to create diversity throughout history class and make gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered students feel as though they have something to offer -- but it ultimately does more harm to history than good to students. Perhaps students should learn that concepts of sexuality change all the time, and even though there was a lack of what we might call "GLBT" figures in history, that does not mean that present-day GLBT students cannot contribute to society today.

Posted by Mark at 3:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

All news in this entry comes from Fark.

Excitement

The New York Post reports that radio shock-jocks Opie and Anthony will be returning to terrestrial radio to replace David Lee Roth, whose show has been receiving terrible ratings. Opie and Anthony were fired back in 2002 after a couple was arrested for having sex in St. Patrick's Cathedral for an Opie and Anthony contest. The duo langoured for a while and were then picked up by XM Satellite Radio.

Anger

Royal Philips Electronics, makers of "Philips"-branded electronics, filed a U.S. patent for a system that prohibits viewers from skipping through commercials with their digital video recorders (DVRs). Philips cautioned, however, that "the anti-channel-changing technology might not sit well with consumers and suggested in its patent filing consumers be allowed to avoid the feature if they paid broadcasters a fee." Here's a great business model: take away rights that consumers are permitted by law, and then charge them to get those rights back. I think one of the big reasons that people like TiVo and other DVR services is that they can skip commercials. Already, other DVR providers are offering systems that don't respect stupid DRM flags inserted by content providers to prevent you from "time shifting" or "content shifting," which are your rights under the law (cf. Sony v. Universal, 464 U.S. 417 [1984]).

Posted by Mark at 1:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Today marks the one hundredth anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. At 5:12 AM this morning, the time of the quake one hundred years ago, city officials and spectators celebrated the anniversary of the single most devastating event to befall the city.

For a few minutes 100 years ago, the San Andreas fault moved and shifted (as much as twenty feet in some places), causing a quake that would probably be rated a 7.5 on today's scales. While the quake itself was devastating -- especially to the unreinforced masonry structures which made up most of the city -- the fires afterward were worse. Tremendous fires started, burning both south of Market Street and north. The North Beach area, which today houses the city's Italian neighborhood, was completely leveled by fire. Only a few buildings -- notably the Ferry Building and the Flood Building -- survived the quake and the subsequent fires.

Read more about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake at Wikipedia.

If you're in the city and you like photographs and art museums, visit the Palace of the Legion of Honor, where a special exhibit "rephotographs" old photographs of earthquake devastation by placing photos of destroyed places alongside modern photos of those same places. Hurry! The exhibit closes May 28!

Posted by Mark at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It hasn't stopped raining in San Francisco since March. Reportedly, it was the rainiest March in the city's history, with 26 days of rain. Apparently, this all happened because the Seattle weather system got pushed southward, so we had Seattle's weather for a month.

If you live in Seattle, good for you. I lived in Seattle for a month, and it sucked. It's still raining off and on here. The good news is that the rain will let up. The bad news is that we're not quite sure when that will be.

This entry was created using ecto, a really cool application for Mac or Windows that allows you to post to your blog without logging in via web browser.

Posted by Mark at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My first week at Interpublic went swimmingly. On Monday, they had me build my own machine, which is apparently a challenge for some people. By "build," I mean they hand me a dual 500 MHz Macintosh G4 tower, a hard drive, some memory, and tell me to make it work. Then Darrin, the person whom I'm replacing, showed me how to use NetRestore to copy a disk image to my new Mac. I'm going to be making a lot of disk images.

I built some more machines this week, sometimes without very much success (I gave a new print producer what's called the "creative" image -- filled with QuarkXPress and the Adobe Creative Suite -- when I wasn't supposed to. Oops!), but often with great success.

Interpublic is a strange company to work for. It's a holding company for a lot of other advertising, PR, and marketing agencies, so things get weird. At the building in which I work, there are three Interpublic companies: McCann-Erickson, FCB, and Zibatoni. The subsidiary I work for is called GIS, which I believe stands for "Global Information Systems." It's the internal name they give the Interpublic IT department.

I work in a building that is connected to another building by a bridge. The side of the building I work on is devoted to McCann-Erickson and Marketing Drive, which is another Interpublic company. On the other side, which requires a key to get into, is an ad agency called FCB (Foote, Cone, & Belding). Though I'm not an FCB employee, I have an FCB email address and an FCB ID card that gets me into the FCB employee cafeteria in Levi's Plaza on Battery Street. And I pretty much spend most of my day with FCB and Marketing Drive; I don't think I've helped a single McCann employee with anything. I also don't report to the local McCann human resources department; if I need something, I have to call New York.

But the people are really cool, and on some Fridays (like this past one), the IT department -- which encompasses the four people at 1160 Battery Street and the seven people at 600 Battery Street -- goes to the San Francisco Brewing Company on Columbus and Pacific for lunch. This past Friday, we celebrated one Mark leaving and another Mark joining the company (the latter is me; the former is a guy who's been with the company for a while but hates the two-hour commute from Petaluma every day). I'm surrounded by Star Wars geeks and people who love XBox. The IT department tries to go to the San Francisco Brewfest every year (Apr. 28 -- mark your calendars!), where, for $50, you get unlimited samples of 200 kinds of beer as well as unlimited free food. Either bring a friend or take a cab home. (Jared and I like beer, but Elizabeth doesn't; however, she does like free food. This all points to "a ride home.")

I don't have an iota of free time while I'm at work. If I'm not building a machine for a new hire, then I'm away from my desk, helping someone with something. But my co-workers are great people and they have no qualms about helping me out with something difficult.

But enough about me. What's been happening in the world?

Hamdan v. Rumsfeld

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 05-184 (oral argument transcript). At issue was whether or not the president has the authority to prescribe guidelines for military tribunals, given the fact that the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Convention both already provide guidelines for the administration of military tribunals. President Bush has created "military commissions" to try suspected terrorists, but some suspects allege that the commissions are unconstitutional and in violation of several international treaties.

Chief Justice Roberts recused himself from the case, as he had ruled it as an appellate judge on the D.C. Circuit Court. There were calls for Justice Scalia to recuse himself, as well, as Scalia had given a talk at the University of Freiburg (Switzerland) in which he "dismissed the idea that the detainees have rights under the U.S. Constitution or international conventions, adding he was 'astounded' at the 'hypocritical' reaction in Europe to Gitmo" (source). In a letter to the court, five retired generals and admirals -- who also filed an amicus brief on behalf of petitioner Hamdan -- suggested that Scalia should recuse himself, as he may have violated the Code of Conduct for United States Judges. In particular, in making the remarks he did at the University of Freiburg, Scalia may have violated Canon 3-A(6), which says, "A judge should avoid public comment on the merits of a pending or impending action, requiring similar restraint by court personnel subject to the judge's direction and control." Since Scalia made "public comment" regarding the rights of enemy combatants, and the rights of enemy combatants is one of the issues faced in Hamdan, then Scalia should recuse himself from the case, since his continued participation after making those comments would be unethical. Also, since Scalia clearly has "a personal bias or prejudice" regarding enemy combantats, he must disqualify himself from the case under Canon 3-C(1)(a).

I didn't plan this war in advance, honest, I didn't!

A recently leaked memo suggests that President Bush was going to war with Iraq whether or not there was a legitimate reason.

In a Jan. 31, 2003 meeting, Bush "made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons." Bush even went so far as to suggest that he might provoke Hussein into making the first move by painting a U.S. surveillance plane with U.N. colors. Gulf of Tonkin, anyone?

This is a blow to Bush's credibility. Bush had always maintained -- even after he himself withdrew weapons inspectors and then blamed the withdrawal on Hussein -- that war was the only viable option, since all diplomatic means had been exhausted. This five-page memo starkly reveals that the Bush administration was determined to go to war no matter what.

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Terri Schiavo's parents, in conjunction with the National Urban Policy Action Council, a Michigan-based nonprofit whose mission is to "promote fiscally responsible compassionate conservative public policies," have declared Mar. 31 "Terri Schiavo Day."

What are we commemorating? Terri Schiavo Day is a "celebration of the 'Culture of Life' as well as celebrating the woman who sacrificed her life for this cause."

Terri Schiavo "sacrificed her life" for the Culture of Life? More correctly, she was taken off of life support after it was determined that she was brain dead, despite the wishes of her parents, who had no say in the matter, and despite the wrongful intervention of the U.S. Congress, the Conservative Christians of which tried to use Terri Schiavo's case to lobby for their Conservative Christian constituents.

Recall also that Bill Frist, a doctor, diagnosed Terri Schiavo as not brain dead after merely watching a videotape of her. He later said that he never did such a thing, despite the fact that he is on record as having done it. After her death, Terri's brain was autopsied and it was determined that much of it -- including her occipital lobe, which is responsible for vision -- had died, making a recovery impossible.

The insidious inference of the Culture of Life is that any life is a good life, even if that life is one of vegetation, paralysis, constant pain. Conservative Christians who have no idea what it is like to live a life in constant pain pass judgment upon those who do live their lives in pain or coma, insisting that just being alive is a gift and that it is not their place to throw away what God gave them. The people in constant pain or coma, if they're able, have radically different stories to tell. Theirs are not stories filled with joy at waking up each morning, thankful to be alive, but stories of misery, stories of depression and anger, stories filled with a desire to die and be over with it.

Terri Schiavo Day is a celebration of passing judgment upon others without knowing what it's like to be in their places. It's a celebration of one group of people handing down morality to everyone else in a display of ignorant patronization. To usurp Terri Schiavo's name and memory for political gain and to suggest that she would rather have lived as an empty, blind, brain-dead shell than a thinking, feeling human being is monstrous.

Posted by Mark at 3:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The subsidiary of Interpublic Group that I would work for, McCann-Erickson, has offices around the country, but its audio/visual studio is in San Francisco. One of the things that interested my boss was my voice acting. He said that sometimes they use employees in commercials and advertisements, and I might have the opportunity to do voice acting in commercials made by McCann-Erickson.

It's my big break!

This space will soon contain my musings on How to Get a Job.

Posted by Mark at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

After months of searching, I finally found a real job, not one in which I'd be dubiously employed. I've been offered a job as a Desktop Support Analyst with The Interpublic Group of Companies, a conglomeration of international advertising and PR agencies.

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On Friday, two disturbing news stories appeared. These stories should make privacy and accountability types shake in their boots.

The first story is about a new bill that is going to be introduced in the Senate. The bill would make it more illegal to disclose the existence of top-secret government programs -- for example, President Bush's illegal, warrantless, poorly-justified wiretapping program. Whoever disclosed this information may have broken the law, but the whistleblower was breaking the law so as to inform the American people about an even bigger incident of someone breaking the law. Only a few Republicans are outraged that someone revealed the existence of a clandestine spying program. The rest of us are more concerned with bigger things -- namely, the existence of a clandestine spying program.

The bill's chief author is Ohio senior senator Mike DeWine. According to The Washington Post, via the Associated Press, which saw a draft of the legislation, the bill is vague in that it makes no distinction between programs that affect national security and programs that don't. Admittedly, I haven't seen the draft legislation, so I'll add as a caveat that the above interpretation is the Associated Press's, not mine.

Next disturbing story: despite the criticisms of security experts, the US Department of State has gone ahead with its plan to include RFID chips in new US passports. The RFID chips will contain all of the information included on the passport's title page, plus a digitized photo of the passport holder. Here's the kicker: there's little or no security in the system. Security experts asked for the smallest concession of a foil-lined cover to prevent the passport from being read clandestinely at a distance (aluminum foil would block the radio signal). Anyone with an RFID reader would be able to stand several feet away and read the information on your passport. Despite your best attempts to be incognito, your passport would identify you as an American ("No, I'm Canadian!") and thus make you a prime target for robbery or kidnapping:

But civil liberties and privacy groups are uneasy about the formation of biometric information databases on US citizens and concerned that identity-theft rings, foreign government agents or even terrorist groups could "skim" information from the RFID chips or "eavesdrop" on the communication between official readers and the microchips.

But as it turns out, the United Nations' group that handles international passport standards wanted the passport to be readable at a distance. Whaaa? Why on Earth would they want the passport to be readable at a distance? That's a huge security problem that will ultimately cause more harm than good, as it would allow the same access to both people who should be able to read passports and people who shouldn't. A foil-lined passport would mean that the passport holder would have to consent to a reading of the RFID chip by opening the passport, meaning it would not be read unless he wanted it to be. A foil-lined passport would also mean that the person reading the passport would have to come into physical contact with the passport holder, ensuring that the passport couldn't be read from several yards away (despite what the US government says, or may say, RFID chips can be read from a considerable distance). We also don't know what kind of encryption scheme is being used in the passports. It could be as simple as cleartext -- meaning that there is no encryption and the data is sent to the RFID reader as it appears on the chip, allowing anyone to intercept the communication and read it.

Posted by Mark at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The New York Times reports today that scoring errors in thousands of SATs have led some to question the validity of the tests.

It's about freaking time!

The SAT measures little or nothing. It's a test of reasoning skills that presents itself as something more. The stated purpose of the SAT is to accurately predict the first-year college grades of the test-taker, but studies have shown that the SAT's predictions are unreliable. For example, as a generality, men score better than women on the SAT, but women receive higher grades their first year in college than men do. This fact in itself should cause anyone and everyone to question why we still use the SAT -- or any other standardized test -- in college admissions. It boils down to two things:

1. Money. The SAT is administered by The College Board, an arm of the powerful Electronic Testing Service (ETS), which runs pretty much every standardized test in the country. The SAT's biggest rival is the ACT, administered by a rival company. Some major colleges and universities switched to the ACT a few years back because it doesn't pretend to be an objective test of objective reasoning. The ACT knows that it's a test of what you have learned in school, and that's what it's supposed to measure. There are Algebra II problems on the ACT, and if you don't know Algebra II, then you won't do well on the questions that require Algebra II knowledge. In 2005, ETS introduced the "new" SAT in its March test administration after its largest client, the University of California system, threatened to switch to the ACT for college admissions of the SAT wasn't made more relevant. Analogies were out; essays were in. ETS spends a lot of money on phony statistical studies to make it appear as though its tests are actually measuring something. And why not? If ETS admitted that its tests were biased (no more racial bias; in studying the SAT -- which was my job this summer and fall -- I found more of a geographical bias than anything else) and unreliable, the company would fall apart. Imagine if thousands of students weren't paying $50 every year to take the SAT (and some students take the test more than once in a calendar year). That's a lot of lost revenue.
2. Sheer Size. Huge state schools like University of Michigan (the largest public university in the country, I believe) and Ohio State University (the second-largest public university, I think) need some way of reducing its applicant pool every year. Admissions employees can't possibly look through the thousands and thousands of applications individually, so they need something to reduce the size. In comes the SAT, which provides a handy number that stands in for "aptitude" or something like that. If OSU or U of M specifies that it will cut off applicants below a certain score, that makes its life easier. The theory is that those schools don't want students who will have poor first-year grades, but the SAT doesn't reliably measure first-year grades, so the point is moot. In any security system, a false positive means that the system isn't working. The SAT is a security system because it's trying to control access to something, and its criterion for access is the composite SAT score. What if ETS released a study showing that terrorism was linked to SAT scores? The higher the score, the lower the probability that a person would blow something up. So, we'd have people taking SATs before they boarded planes. This is a more obvious example of a security system in action, and it's ridiculous. The SAT controlling access to colleges is just as ridiculous and meaningless, but we don't think it's so ridiculous because we've accepted it as "normal." The SAT is a way of restricting access to a scarce resource, and that's fine. But the problem is that the SAT doesn't restrict that access to the people it says it's going to restrict access to. Plenty of smart people are shut out of the system because they don't take tests well. Plenty of dumb people learn to circumvent the system because of test preparation companies <cough>. Like Bruce Schneier says, any person can invent a system so secure that he can't figure out how to get past it. For years, ETS claimed the SAT couldn't be cracked, but in 1981, The Princeton Review figured it out. Now many other companies have followed. Test preparation is an industry. We should be concerned about this.

And now we found out that kids are losing, in some cases, 400 points due to errors caused by someone else. 400 points on the new test (for those of you who aren't familiar with the new test) is about 266 points on the old test. This can be the difference between getting into a college and being rejected from a college. We're talking life-altering stuff, here.

And the appeals process for the SAT isn't easy. And since you're not permitted to remove any exam materials from the room, it's not like you can prove that something was scored badly. You'd have to wait until you received your score report three weeks later and noticed that a correct answer was marked incorrect, in which case, you'd have to go through a lengthy appeals process. During the time this is happening, you're also applying to colleges, and they're not going to sit and wait while you appeal your SAT score.

With the rise of standardized testing standing in for intelligence, aptitude, or learning, we must question machine-scored results. Machines are not infalliable, and in some cases, the supposed infalliabiltiy of those machines means that people don't go to the colleges they should, people don't graduate from high school, and presidents are dubiously elected.

Posted by Mark at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Line-item veto

President Bush reiterated on Monday his call for the line-item veto. You'll recall that Bush mentioned the line-item veto in his State of the Union speech in January, leading many of us to ask, in the way that kids do these days, "WTF?!"

The Supreme Court ruled in in 1998 that the line-item veto -- the ability of a president to veto portions of legislation without vetoing the whole bill -- was unconstitutional, since it allowed the president to effectively rewrite legislation, giving him the powers of a legislator. The Constitution says that legislative authority is vested only in Congress and in no one else. Congress also does not have the authority to delegate its legislative responsibility to anyone else. Since Congress's powers are enumerated, Congress only has a power if the Constitution says it does. Omission does not constitute endorsement within the Constitution.

The line-item veto also violated another part of Article I of the Constitution, which specifies that the president may perform only two actions when presented with a bill: "sign it" into law or "return it" to the house of Congress that it came from. Again, the omission of a possible action does not constitute an implicit approval of that action.

Bush, though, insists that his new line-item veto proposal will pass the constitutional test (even though that's impossible, as the line-item veto itself is inherently unconstitutional). He also insists, however irrelevantly, that 43 state governors have line-item veto authority, which means that the U.S. president should have it, too.

High court says 'yes' to military recruiters

Monday was also the day when the Supreme Court ruled on the controversial Rumsfeld v. FAIR, chronicled in a previous entry. The Court unanimously decided that it was permissible for the federal government to deny certain higher educations funds to universities that didn't allow military recruiters the same access to campus it allowed to other kinds of recruiters.

While I had hoped that the Court would see the Solomon Amendment as a violation of freedom of expressive association, seven justices (Alito doesn't count because he didn't hear oral arguments in the case, and O'Connor doesn't count because she is no longer on the court) felt that there was no such issue. Chief Justice Roberts, writing the opinion, focused on the Solomon Amendment's requirement that universities offer equal access to both military and civilian recruiters: "Compelling a law school that sends e-mails for other recruiters to send one for a military recruiter is simply not the same as forcing a student to pledge allegiance to the flag." Thus the issue is not one of compelled speech, but of universities playing by their own rules.

The Court also rejects a comparison between this case and Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, which I -- wrongly, apparently -- said was similar to this case. If freedom of expressive association is discounted, then the conclusion reached in Dale is a moot point.

Also, seen from the point of view of the military, it is the university that is impacting the military's freedom of speech. The university provides resources for civilian recruiters (providing recruiters with access to receptions, including them in interviews), but not for military recruiters because it disagrees with the military's message. A public university, as an extention of Congress, cannot discriminate among speech it likes and speech it does not in providing equal access to resources.

South Dakota will probably challenge Roe

Now that Alito is on the Court, anti-abortion types are getting pumped for a challenge to Roe v. Wade. South Dakota's governor signed into law on Monday a bill outlawing abortions in South Dakota. The law is in flagrant violation of Roe, which is the point. Anti-abortionists are foaming at the mouth with hope that the law will be challenged in court, and will eventually arrive at the U.S. Supreme Court. Now, with Alito there, a possibility exists that Roe could be reversed and the Religious Right will have completed their transaction with George W. Bush: "Make me president, and I'll appoint justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade."

The South Dakota law makes an exception only to save the life of the mother, but makes abortion illegal in every other instance, including rape or incest.

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If you're Catholic, then Lent has begun, and you've decided that you're going to give something up for the next forty days. If you're Mark, then it's Wednesday.

Yesterday, to celebrate Mardi Gras, I went to a picnic at People's Park in Berkeley. The picnic was organized by a local chapter of Food Not Bombs, a worldwide organization that promotes peace and social change by providing free vegetarian meals at protests and other events.

Yes, vegetarian. Welcome to Berkeley, where everything is vegetarian.

The picnic is also sponsored by The One True Church of the Great Green Frog, which organizes a Mardi Gras parade in Berkeley every year. Members of the Church (or even non-members) dress up in costume, construct floats, and march through Berkeley. The parade events began at 6 AM with a pancake breakfast, after which they paraded around the city and ended up at People's Park around 2:30 PM. After a nice lunch courtesy of Food Not Bombs, the parade was off again, ending somewhere on Sacramento Street at sundown.

Okay, so they're hippies. But they're also social activists. The ones who aren't crazy, anyway. Not all people in Berkeley fall into the hippie stereotype. Some of them, like the woman who was yelling in People's Park about peace and love and then decided to take her top off and yell about peace and love, do fall into that stereotype. But by and large, they're really nice, interesting people who want to have a good time and be as inclusive as they can.

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On Feb. 14, 1929, seven men walked into the offices of the S.M.C. Cartage Company in downtown Chicago. They thought they were meeting some other men there to talk about obtaining shipments of bootleg liquor. It was the height of Prohibition, and Al Capone's South Side gang was the leader in organized crime in Chicago. George "Bugs" Moran's North Side gang used to rival Capone's gang for power, but after the deaths of two of the North Side gang's leaders, it was in no position to rival anyone for power, especially with Moran in charge. Moran was no mob leader; he was a safe-cracker by trade who rose quickly through the ranks of the North Side gang.

The seven men who entered the S.M.C. Cartage Company's warehouse were from Bugs Moran's North Side gang. The S.M.C. Cartage Co. was a known front for bootleg liquor, so when the men were met by police officers instead of mobsters, they took it in stride. They probably wouldn't even be arrested. The Chicago police department, the attorneys' offices, the judges, and the juries were all owned by organized crime. Capone had been found not guilty several times of various crimes -- not because he didn't commit them, but because he paid off everyone who had the power to convict him.

The police officers told the seven men to stand with their faces toward a brick wall. The men complied, thinking this was just routine and that they would be out of here in no time after paying the cops off.

But the two men dressed like cops weren't cops. Two more men, dressed in street clothes, entered the warehouse. All four were armed with Thompson submachine guns. Without warning, they opened fire on the seven men facing the brick wall. Thompsons submachine guns fired .45 caliber slugs at 800 rounds per minute. The seven men facing the wall never had a chance. Only one survived long enough to crawl out of the warehouse and find help.

The Chicago newspapers called it "the St. Valentine's Day Massacre." Al Capone was blamed, since all the victims were from his rival gang. Capone, though, had quite an alibi: he was in his villa in Florida the whole time and found out about it by reading the papers. History, though, would understand otherwise. The hit was ordered by Capone. It was actually designed to kill Bugs Moran, who was on his way to the warehouse with the other seven men. Moran thought he saw a cop outside the S.M.C. Cartage Co. warehouse and fled, thinking it was a set-up. Nevertheless, a Capone lookout thought he saw Moran enter the warehouse (he actually saw someone else whom he thought was Moran) and gave the signal to go through with the plan.

The people of Chicago had put up with mob violence for a long time, but the St. Valentine's Day Massacre was more than they could handle. Vivid pictures of pools of blood and horrible descriptions of violence were the last straw: Chicago refused to tolerate mob violence any longer.

Capone would never be convicted of this or any other crime, save the crime of tax evasion. Eliot Ness and a team of accountants from the Department of the Treasury figured out that while Capone could easily weasel his way out of a variety of crimes because he didn't actually physically commit them, he did commit tax evasion. His mob empire pulled in millions of dollars each year, all of which was taxable, and for none of which Capone had ever paid any federal taxes. Capone was convicted of tax evasion on Oct. 17, 1931 and sent to the federal prison in Atlanta, Ga. Frank "The Enforcer" Nitti took over the operations of Capone's empire once Capone went to prison, but things were never the same. The mob took a hit in 1933 when the 21st Amendment was ratified, ending Prohibition.

Capone, a very high-profile inmate, was moved from Atlanta to Alcatraz in 1934. Syphillis slowly destroyed his mind, and when he was released from Alcatraz in 1939, the once-brilliant mob boss was "confused and disoriented." He died in his Florida villa in 1947.

Please read more about the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and the history of the 1920s Chicago mob.

If you want to watch a dramatized version of the 1920s mob saga, rent or watch The Untouchables, which doesn't refer to the lowest Indian caste, but rather to the nickname of Eliot Ness's treasury department team. They were "untouchable" because they couldn't be bribed.

Happy St. Valentine's Day!

Posted by Mark at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

How do you improve U.S. higher education? According to experts who testified at an Education Department hearing yesterday, here's what we can do:

• Allow people to create “lifelong-learning accounts” in which they could make tax-deductible contribution toward funding their higher education. Employers could then match those funds, suggested Pam Tate, president of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning. She estimated that individuals could save $1,000 a year between their own contributions and an employer match.
• Raise expectations for high school students. Students should take a full four years in core curriculum, such as math, said David Conley, director for the Central for Educational Policy Research at the University of Oregon. That would better prepare them, not just to get into college, but also to succeed once they enter.
• Establish communities of support within higher education institutions for underrepresented minorities. Universities should learn more about their students’ cultures and hire more diverse faculty members, said Pam Silas, executive director of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society.

My problem with the first bullet point was immediate: employers don't want to do that. Ever since United Airlines cajoled the government into saying that United didn't need to honor its employee pension plans, other major companies -- like General Motors -- have followed suit. Companies that want to increase the bottom line would like nothing more than to dump employee benefit programs. Health care and retirement plans cost the company money. We're a capitalistic society, right? Why can't people pay for their own health care? Why can't they contribute to their own retirement plan? Why do employers have to match employee contributions to a 401(k)? And now the government wants employers to match funds for a higher-education savings plan?

Not going to happen. Now that United and GM have gotten out of their contracts with their employees, expect more large companies to do the same. Why cut executive salaries or alter outdated business models when we could have the government bail us out? Just watch: if things keep going the way they have been, employer-sponsored health care will be a thing of the past. Education accounts won't even be on the radar. The executives, who can afford private health care, will be fine. The poorest Americans could never afford private health care, anyway, and it's unlikely that they're in jobs where they're provided with health care by their employer. <cough>Wal-Mart</cough> No, it's the middle class -- the people who live comfortably, but on the razor's edge between surplus and debt -- who will suffer the most. Right now, they try as hard as they can to appear well-to-do (the prevalence of Ikea is evidence enough of that), but their well-to-do lifestyle will take a hit when they have to pay for their own health care. They'll default on their mortgages and move into smaller houses owned by the executives. They'll go into bankruptcy because, under the new laws written by the credit-card companies, they will be penalized for events outside of their control, since the credit-card companies would like you to believe that bankruptcy happens because people are irresponsible and thus need to be punished for going into debt (it's the only way they'll learn).

And where will people turn once they're bankrupt? Why, to the Good Book, of course. To Evangelical Protestantism and the promise of a better life in heaven. To good Christian morality. To blaming the ACLU, abortionists, People for the American Way, and the gays for the problems they're facing. God is punishing us for allowing such secular ideals to pervade our City upon a Hill, and if we ever want to see the Second Coming or even get into heaven, we had better burn the ACLU, the gays, and the abortion doctors alive in the temple in Jerusalem. The smell of burning sinners will waft toward heaven, and God will smile upon those who are faithful to Him and reward them with a better life here on Earth and in heaven. (They might burn Jews, too.)

Thanks, America. You're a real peach. The world is a safer place.

Posted by Mark at 1:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday, I finally received my permanent belay card at Berkeley IronWorks.

For those of you unfamiliar with the lingo, "Berkeley IronWorks" is a gym in Berkeley with several climbing walls. Elizabeth and I have been taking up rock climbing in our spare time, and Berkeley IronWorks -- in addition to being one of the best climbing gyms in the country -- is right down the street. It's called "IronWorks" because the building actually used to be an ironworks. They've retained most of the internal ironworks structures inside the building to give it some character.

As a side note, I can't believe that as a Miami student for four years, I had the opportunity to get free climbing lessons and climb the wall at the Rec for free. The walls at Berkeley IronWorks are higher, and there's more of them, but it would still have been good to do for four years.

Second, "belay" is what the person at the bottom end of a top-rope does. A pulley is affixed at the top of the wall, and one person climbs up the wall, while the other person takes up slack as the person goes up and stops the person if he or she starts to fall. We've been to Berkeley IronWorks about four times now, and every time you go, you have to take a belay test to prove to them that you know how to belay. I mean, people's lives are at stake. If you belay incorrectly, someone could die.

If they think you're okay at belaying, they'll give you a belay card for the day, which means you'll have to re-test the next time you come in. If they think you've done it perfectly, then they'll give you a permanent belay card, so no more testing when you come in.

Even though Elizabeth and I belayed rather well the first time we came in, they still gave us temporary cards. I think it's their policy to not pass anyone the first couple times they take the test, just to make sure they get everything down right.

Rock climbing is actually one of the most inexpensive of the outdoor sports. We found a deal at a local sporting goods store where you can get a climbing harness, shoes, caribeener, ATC belay device, and chalk bag all for $140. This is probably a $50 savings, as harnesses themselves cost about $60 and shoes start at around $90. The caribeener and belay device would probably be $30. And a bag of chalk and chalk to fill it with would probably be $10.

You think that's expensive? Compare the price of rock climbing with the price of skiing, in which it costs about a hundred bucks just to ski for the day. A membership to Berkeley IronWorks is $60 a month, and you can come in and use the climbing walls, weight machines, cardiovascular machines -- whatever, with no restrictions. Also, a pretty good set of climbing equipment (sans rope, about a $90 value) costs about $170. A pretty good set of ski equipment costs a few thousand dollars. Plus, with climbing, you're not freaking cold all the time, and you can go indoor climbing even when it's raining outside!

And guess what? It turns out I'm good at climbing. I have the upper-body strength of a man, but the flexibility of a woman. And I don't weigh a lot. That all adds up to "rock climbing superstar," except when it comes to routes with small holds. Then I don't shine so much. I usually just fall a lot or get fed up and come down.

The film Munich is, like Syriana and Paradise Now, a fascinating look at terrorism. The movie opens with the 1972 slaying of eleven members of the Israeli Olympic Team at the Munich Olympics by Arab terrorists. This is re-told through a combination of dramatization and real TV footage from 1972. (Howard Cosell lives again!)

The film then follows an Israeli intelligence officer as he is given a covert mission by the Israeli government to kill 11 Arabs, all of whom were responsible for planning the Munich event. We follow this intelligence officer as he and his team get involved in assassination and international terrorism. The main character, Avner, loses his moral simplicity and discovers that it's a lot easier to say that we need to kill people than it is to actually kill people.

Posted by Mark at 1:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

So, Elizabeth just called me to make sure I was okay, because police defused a bomb placed in a Starbucks in downtown San Francisco. Knowing my penchant for coffee, she was afraid for me, but I was just fine and hadn't had any coffee since I spilled a cup of it this morning on a desk that isn't mine.

Turns out the bomb was relatively far from any Starbucks I might go to, although to give you an idea of just how close that place is, here's a Google map showing how far away the place where I work (369 Pine St.) is from the Starbucks in question (1401 Van Ness Ave.).

Richard, a guy in the office where I work, suggested that rival coffee chain Peet's might have planted the bomb, but I think that's taking industrial espionage to new and dangerous levels.

Posted by Mark at 4:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wired magazine writer Kevin Poulsen lists the best and worst tech moments of 2005.

With tech stuff taken care of, let's look at what happened politically in 2005. The year began George W. Bush's second term. In his inaugural address, he said that he had a "mandate" and "political capital" that he intended to spend in the coming four years. After his Social Security initiative failed to gain support, a lot of things started to go wrong. In June, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement, raising the eyebrows of everyone in Washington. Who would Bush pick? The Democrats wanted a moderate. Bush's base -- consisting of the religious right and corporate fatcats -- wanted a nominee who would overturn Roe v. Wade if the opportunity asserted itself. Bush chose D.C. Circuit Court judge John Roberts.

Pope died. That happened before June, but I didn't want to split up my paragraphs. After a few days of voting, Cardinal John Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI. Pope "Eggs" Benedict has cut down on liberalism within the church, mandating that no priest can be homosexual, not even if he's celibate. Unexpectedly, he has ordered an increase in the church's supply of hollandaise sauce.

But it was about to get worse. In July, bereaved mother Cindy Sheehan went to Bush's ranch in Crawford, Tex. with a few family members in order to ask the president for what noble cause her son died last year. The camp-out turned into a magnet for war protestors as they came by the busload to Crawford to protest the war in Iraq. Bush and his Republican Spin Machine tried their best to smear Cindy Sheehan, portraying her as a puppet of far-left personalities George Soros and Michael Moore. Ultimately, though, the American people didn't buy either Sheehan's or Bush's arguments. Instead, they fell asleep, as is the custom of their people.

John Roberts was just about to begin his hearings as a new Supreme Court justice when Chief Justice William Rehnquist died, prompting Bush to elevate his nomination to the chief justice nomination. Great idea, but that meant that poor Sandra Day O'Connor had to remain on the bench.

Then, in September, a hurricane blew away the "political capital" that Bush claimed to have earned in the 2004 election. Hurricane Katrina attacked the Gulf of Mexico, leaving typical hurricane stuff in its wake. But it also left the city of New Orleans devastated by floods and revealed just how callous and unprepared our government was for such a disaster. Hurricane Katrina was, by all accounts, a complete foul-up that exposed many interesting facts, one of them that the nation's director of federal emergency management had absolutely, 100% no experience managing disasters and got the job because he was roommates in college with the old FEMA director. Oops.

And suddenly, the newsmedia that had been castrated since Sept. 11 started to ask questions again, to wonder why such a thing could happen, how such people could be employed, and why the government didn't do anything sooner or better. Down side: Anderson Cooper wasn't helping anyone by driving around in a boat and lamenting the devastation.

Hurricane Katrina also caused a spike in the price of oil ... or did it? Complex charts and graphs reveal that the price of oil was already on the rise before Hurricane Katrina destroyed the Gulf region's oil production. How about that? Sounds like we need to call the CEOs of the major American oil companies into a Senate hearing for some answers! Unfortunately for America, Alaskan senator Ted Stevens was in charge of the hearing. He could barely mask the fact that he was in bed with all of those CEOs as he decided that they wouldn't be required to testify under oath, despite motions from other committee members requesting it.

Following John Roberts' confirmation, Bush forwarded a new nominee for the O'Connor position: White House Counsel Harriet Miers. Oh, man, if he wanted to prove that he employed competent people, this was not the way to go about it. Miers angered Democrats who said that she wasn't qualified; she also angered Republicans who wanted a nominee that they could be absolutely sure would overturn Roe v. Wade. After a month of haranguing, Miers "withdrew herself" from the nomination after closed-door meetings between Bush and Senate Republicans revealed that there wasn't enough support in the Senate to get her out of committee.

U.S. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald indicted Vice Presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame case. Woo!

Then, Bush went to Latin America. That went well, if "well" means dozens of anti-American protests. The president didn't do himself any favors by taking a pot-shot at Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who is also president of the Central and South American Branch of the Anti-Bush Fan Club. Turns out that the war in Iraq -- in addition to making the world safer -- has also made America less popular in the eyes of ... well, everyone who doesn't spend the day watching NASCAR. And that happens to be most of the rest of the world.

In Califoahneeah, Gov. John Kimball tried to get voters to approve measures that were bad for them. Curiously, they decided they didn't want to enact measures that were bad for them. Arnold Schwarzenegger remains at large.

The Washington Post revealed the existence of secret CIA prisons around the world, prompting the Bush administration to reply, "What prisons?" At the same time, it was revealed that Vice President "Darth" Cheney opposed John McCain-sponsored anti-torture legislation. The administration's usual tactics of ignoring the problem and smearing the critics wouldn't work this time; the legislation had the support of 90 of the Senate's 100 members. Bush, true to form, didn't seem to understand the conflict inherent in the statement "We do not torture" and the action of opposing anti-torture legislation. Bush's excuse was that they didn't want to rule out any tactics in the War on Terr'. Hell, as long as we're not ruling out tactics, let's put nuclear weapons on the table! What's the matter, Bush? Are you yella?

And, most recently, it was revealed that the NSA has been conducting semi-legal wiretaps within the U.S., all in the name of the War on Terr'.

Now, let's assemble a list of SEDHE Villains of the Year:

• George W. Bush, U.S. President
• Dick Cheney, U.S. Vice President
• Karl Rove, White House Deputy Chief of Staff (for now)
• Bill O'Reilly, Fox News Political Pundit
• Michael "Brownie" Brown, Disgraced Former FEMA Director
• Harriet Miers, Semi-Competent White House Counsel
• Ted Stevens, R-AK

All of these people have done something to really make me mad, whether it is placing the nation in more danger than it was in before, being incompetent, or generally being a jerk. I don't need to justify anything; it's my blog.

Oh, and guess what? Turns out that one of the craftsmen of this NSA wiretapping thing is a Boalt Hall (UC Berkeley) law professor, John Yoo. Man, what a great place to hide! Put that guy on my list, too.

Posted by Mark at 3:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In the United States, Great Britain, and other Christian places, it's Christmas time. In the United States, some African-Americans are preparing to celebrate Kwanzaa, a holiday invented out of whole cloth in 1966 by Dr. Maulana Karenga, then a professor at the University of California at Long Beach.

Tomorrow, in Great Britain, they will celebrate Boxing Day, historically the day when the servants got Christmas gifts from their employers (and also, apparently the feast day of St. Stephen).

Hannukah begins at sundown tonight. It's actually a minor Jewish holiday, but Christians made it into a major holiday because they figured that since Hanukkah coincided with their (Christians') major holiday, it must be major, too.

Ramadan has no relation to the month of December or to anything related to Christmas. The Islamic calendar is based on the moon, and as such, Ramadan happens at different times in different years by the Gregorian calendar. This year, for example, Ramadan began the first week of October.

George W. Bush, what have you gotten the United States for Christmas? Oh, look! It's a New York Times story about how the NSA harvested even more information than we could have imagined from their semi-legal wiretaps.

Merry Christmas!

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Tuesday, The Washington Post revealed that the CIA has been holding and interrograting terror suspects in an Eastern European prison since September 11. No one has discovered this until now because the CIA has been keeping these suspects in secret. In fact, the CIA still officially won't acknowledge the existence of this and other secret prisons. What's more, the CIA has a worldwide system of secret prisons that was set up four years ago.

Despite official disavowing of the existence of such secret prisons, CIA director Porter Goss and Vice President Dick Cheney have asked that the CIA be exempted from Senate legislation that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody. If there's no secret prisons, and we're conforming to the Geneva convention, then why would we ask for such exemptions? Furthermore, if it's not the policy of the United States to engage in torture, then why are we asking for what amount to exemptions from prosecution for torture?!

If you are an American, then an unknown number of prisoners, who have been imprisoned without trial and without regard to whether they may have actually committed a crime or not, is being tortured in your name. The Bush Administration doesn't consider the constraints of the Geneva Convention to apply on non-American soil. (This is the only reason why they set up Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay; the administration thought that Guantanamo Bay was outside the jurisdiction of the United States, and thus outside the jurisdiction of our "official" laws condemning torture. And they say Bill Clinton used legalese.)

And now for something completely different

If Dick Cheney is asked to testify in Scooter Libby's perjury case, will he be required to be under oath? After all, when Cheney appeared in front of the September 11 Commission, he was not under oath. Will he be able to use executive privilege to refuse to answer questions?

Answer: no. In a criminal investigation, executive privilege cannot be used as a justification for refusing to answer questions. In Cheney v. U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, 03-475 (2004), the Supreme Court ruled that the proceedings of the Vice-Presidential Energy Task Force could be protected by executive privilege because there was no criminal investigation. In United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683 (1974), the Supreme Court ruled that Richard Nixon had to turn over the "Watergate tapes" despite his assertion of executive privilege. Among other things, the court ruled:

Absent a claim of need to protect military, diplomatic, or sensitive national security secrets, the confidentiality of Presidential communications is not significantly diminished by producing material for a criminal trial under the protected conditions of in camera inspection, and any absolute executive privilege under Art. II of the Constitution would plainly conflict with the function of the courts under the Constitution.

Also:

[W]hen a claim of Presidential privilege as to materials subpoenaed for use in a criminal trial is based, as it is here, not on the ground that military or diplomatic secrets are implicated, but merely on the ground of a generalized interest in confidentiality, the President's generalized assertion of privilege must yield to the demonstrated, specific need for evidence in a pending criminal trial and the fundamental demands of due process of law in the fair administration of criminal justice.

United States v. Nixon was an 8-0 decision. Newly-appointed Justice Rehnquist took no part in the decision, since he was fresh out of his position as Assistant Attorney General. So, I think Cheney will have some tough, oath-ified questions to answer.

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Eagle-eyed reader Andrew read my earlier post about Prop. 77 and didn't care at all for my reading of the initiative. He pointed out that, in my tirade, I omitted the portion of Prop. 77 that people object to -- the part that allows a redistricting plan to go into effect before the voters can decide on it:

(g) The final redistricting plan shall be approved by a single resolution adopted unanimously by the Special Masters and shall become effective upon its filing with the Secretary of State for use at the next statewide primary and general elections, and, if adopted by initiative pursuant to subdivision (h), for succeeding elections until the next adjustment of boundaries is required pursuant to this article.

So, it appears I was completely wrong. Upon being approved by the Special Masters, a redistricting plan becomes law, temporarily, for the next election. For it to become permanent until the next census, it must be approved by the voters. Section (i) of the initiative says that anyone elected under a redistricting plan that is approved by the Special Masters but rejected by the voters shall serve out his full term "notwithstanding the voters’ disapproval of the plan for use in succeeding primary and general elections."

In the face of this startling new information (which would not have been so startling if I knew how to read), I'm changing my mind: VOTE NO ON PROP. 77.

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U.S.S. EXCELSIOR -- After years of commanding the USS Excelsior, the pride of the Excelsior class, Capt. Hikaru Sulu has revealed a secret that he has kept with him since his days as a helmsman on the USS Enterprise: he is a homosexual.

Capt. Sulu chose to come out by traveling to the past and telling Frontiers, a Los Angeles-based magazine covering the gay and lesbian community, that he was gay. Capt. Sulu used his time-traveling alias, George Takei, when speaking with Frontiers, but researchers at the Starfleet News Network knew it was him, anyway.

"Takei" said that his current stage role as psychologist Martin Dysart in the play Equus helped him decide to come out. Takei, a Japanese-American, lived in an internment camp between the ages of 4 and 8. He feels very strongly about racism and speaks frequently about Japanese internment. Takei likens prejudice against homosexuals to racism.

He also said that the state of the world helped him decide to come out. "The world has changed from when I was a young teen feeling ashamed for being gay," Takei told the Associated Press. "The issue of gay marriage is now a political issue. That would have been unthinkable when I was young."

Of course, upon returning to the 23rd century, "Takei" (who will then be known once again as Capt. Hikaru Sulu) will be accepted by his friends, family, and colleagues. His announcement will be a non-issue because the 23rd century is very tolerant of difference. Unless your only son was killed by a Klingon. Then you might have some issues.

[This is an actual news story. George Takei really did come out yesterday. --Ed.]

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BERKELEY, Calif. -- It's been quite a weekend. Friday, I went with Elizabeth and one of her co-workers to Petaluma to help them get some old dentists' chairs. It was a fun ride, and Bill, her co-worker, is about 50 and has one hundred thousand stories to tell about being a hippie. That night, we tried to watch Citizen Kane, which is loosely based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, but the CD was messed up. I have to go to Blockbuster and demand a complimentary rental.

Saturday, we went to The MAiZE in Fremont. It's a five-acre corn maze and it was a blast. On the same property, they had Indian corn, gourds, squashes, and pumpkins for sale. We got some pumpkins for carving and Indian corn for putting on the wall somewhere. Indian corn is pretty.

Saturday night we visited The Pirates of Emerson, a nationally-recognized haunted house. But we weren't terribly impressed, having visited Cincinnati's U.S.S. Nightmare the year before. U.S.S. Nightmare is also nationally renowned, and it's a lot bigger. What The Pirates of Emerson did have was a 3-D haunted house, something I had never seen before. All of the drawings on the walls are done with a 3-D effect, so when you put on the 3-D glasses you're given at the beginning of the haunted house, the wall drawings look like they have depth. Ultimately, though, The Pirates of Emerson was only "okay." If you're in Ohio, visit The Haunted Schoolhouse and The Haunted Laboratory in Akron. For the low, low price of $11 per person per haunted house, you get about six floors each of terror. I'd bet the whole experience takes about an hour and a half, which is incredibly long by haunted house standards. The Haunted Schoolhouse and Laboratory are friggin' huge and provide top-notch scares. It's probably been ten years since I've visited them, but I hope they're still as amazing as when I went to see them.

Sunday, we visited Santa Cruz. The showpiece of Santa Cruz is the Boardwalk, which has been styled in the tradition of seaside amusement parks like Coney Island. It was here that I met a figure from Cleveland's past: Laffing Sal. Laffing Sal was an animatronic woman with red hair and a giant, gap-toothed smile who greeted visitors to Cleveland's now-defunct Euclid Beach Park. All she did was shake back and forth, accompained by a laugh soundtrack. She just kept on laughing. When Euclid Beach Park closed in the 1970s, like most of the seaside amusement parks around the country, Laffing Sal was purchased at auction.

Walking along the boardwalk at Santa Cruz, I spotted an animatronic figure in a window. I immediately, instinctively knew what it was. An actual-factual, functioning Laffing Sal. Holy crap! So Santa Cruz had one, too! I suddenly remembered everything my mother and great-grandmother had told me about Euclid Beach Park. They were right: Laffing Sal was freaking scary.

As it turns out, Laffing Sal was not unique to Euclid Beach Park. A placard next to her proclaimed that she was one of 300 such animatronic figures manufactured between 1930 and 1950 -- the heyday of seaside amusement parks. This particular one resided in San Francisco's Playland at the Beach amusement park until it closed in 1972.

We bought saltwater taffy and walked along the boardwalk. We rode one of the dark rides. I can't stress how awesome it is to ride an actual, old-timey dark ride. Everything in modern amusement parks -- Disneyland, Six Flags, Universal Studios -- owes its existence to rides at seaside amusement parks like this one. The Spiderman 3D ride at Universal Studios Islands of Adventure in Orlando is just a very expensive version of rides invented in the 1920s at Coney Island.

We drove back north via Half-Moon Bay and ate at a Hawaiian restaurant called Ono Hawaiian Grill, which has fantastic Hawaiian food. Go there. I demand it!

Assorted news items

If you value copyright, then don't upgrade to iTunes 6.0 just yet. JHymn, the program that allows users to retake their rights, isn't compatible with iTunes 6.0 because the encryption scheme is different from the scheme in previous versions, but the author is working on it. The iTunes Music Store's Fairplay DRM imposes limitations on end-users that are greater than the statutory limitations that copyright imposes. Copyrighting does not allow the publisher to control how you use the work in the privacy of your own home. Copyright allows you to copy a song to as many CDs as you want; iTunes does not. How odd that we must break the law (circumventing a copy-protection scheme is illegal under the DMCA, even if that copy-protection scheme breaks copyright law by being overly restrictive) in order to exercise our rights.

President Bush decided to try something new and appoint to a government post someone's who actually qualified for the job. Alan Greenspan, who has chaired the Federal Reserve Board of Governors for twenty-some years -- through Republican and Democrat administrations -- will step down Jan. 31, 2006 when his term expires. Bush's nomination for his successor, Ben Bernanke, is a former Princeton University professor, a former Federal Reserve governor, and current chief of the White House Council of Economic Advisors. Naturally, he's a Republican, but at least he knows what he's doing. Hopefully, he'll do more than "a heck of a job" as the person who can make the stock markets go up or down with a flick of the wrist.

Under the stupid guise of guarding against terrorism, the government has ordered "hundreds of universities, online communications companies, and cities to overhaul their Internet computer networks to make it easier for law enforcement authorities to monitor e-mail and other online communications." Because when government is given broad surveillance powers, it will use them wisely. Oh, wait. No, it won't.

In a last-ditch attempt to save his own ass, Tom DeLay has requested that Judge Bob Perkins, who will be overseeing DeLay's prosecution for money-laundering, recuse himself since Perkins made recent donations to the Democratic Party. Dick DeGuerin, DeLay's lawyer, is really grasping at straws. Given who some of DeGuerin's past clients were (David Koresh, e.g.), DeLay's going to need all the administrative and technical stuff in his favor that he can get.

And, finally, Harriet Miers is unqualified to be a Supreme Court justice. The bipartisan Senate Judiciary Committee asked her for a "do-over" with regard to a 50-page questionnaire she filled out for them. Both the committee's Republican leader -- Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania -- and its highest-ranking Democrat, Patrick Leahy of Vermont -- asked Miers to resubmit the questionnaire in light of "incomplete responses about her legal career, her work in the White House, her potential conflicts on cases involving the administration and the suspension of her license by the District of Columbia Bar." For example, the questionnaire asks if Miers had ever talked to anyone else about how she might rule on particular issues. Her answer: "No." One word. That was her answer. In general, the problem with her answers is that they were insufficient and not specific enough. They don't even offer do-overs in college for poor answers on essays. Why should the Supreme Court questionnaire allow a do-over if COM 135 doesn't?

That's all for now. The world is a safer place.

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So, Elizabeth and I went to see Everything Is Illuminated on Tuesday. The film is so indie that it's playing only in particular areas. It stars Elijah Wood as a man looking for the Ukranian woman who saved his grandfather's life. Newcomer Eugene Hutz is the grandson of the man who runs a business helping descendants of Holocaust victims find their families. It's a good movie.

Well, Eugene Hutz really is Ukranian, and for the past several years he's been the frontman for a Gypsy/punk rock band called Gogol Bordello. Hutz actually is a Gypsy, too, and he spent his childhood roving Europe, living the Roma lifestyle. On Thursday, we were casually flipping through the newspaper at about 4:30 and saw that Gogol Bordello was actually playing at a club called Slim's on 11th St. in San Francisco. This will be awesome, we thought.

But on the BART ride over there, we began to equivocate: we have to get up early tomorrow, why don't we go Friday night, maybe we should have just driven, because, you know, there might be parking after all, but who knows, this is San Francisco, etc. But I finally decided -- after Elizabeth placed the onus of decision on me -- that we would go see Gogol Bordello. Waiting in line for tickets, we saw Eugene Hutz -- sporting his trademark ridiculous moustache -- get off a bus that was parked in front of Slim's. It was him! The guy from Everything Is Illuminated! And, you know, he's not that much taller than me in real life.

We went into Slim's and got some drinks. Another band was playing, and a second was sure to follow them before Gogol Bordello. I looked around the room and saw a guy standing by himself about two feet behind us. He was wearing a fedora-style hat and what looked to be a Blazer. It's the typical uniform of punk rockers: a blazer made of odd material and a weird hat. But this guy seemed familiar.

"There's a guy in a hat behind us who looks an awful lot like Elijah Wood," I told Elizabeth. She turned and looked behind us.

"Yeah, it does." And so we kept on looking at this guy, coming up with reasons why it wasn't Elijah Wood, because Elijah Wood doesn't come to clubs in San Francisco where we happen to be and just stand by himself. "But look. He's singing the lyrics to this band's songs. He must be one of their friends," she replied. Naturally, if Elijah Wood were there, he would be singing along with Gogol Bordello, since he became friends with Eugene Hutz while the two of them were making Everything Is Illuminated. And besides, if it really were Elijah Wood -- which it definitely wasn't, because that's crazy talk -- he would be surrounded by throngs of screaming fans.

But we couldn't stop looking over at him. He was about how tall we thought Elijah Wood might be, and he had the right profile and -- especially -- he had the eyes. Elijah Wood has large, expressive eyes, and this guy had them. So we got closer.

After the band finished playing, a bunch of people huddled around this guy, who had previously been alone. A beautiful woman started kissing him. Okay, fine. So this guy has some friends and a girlfriend. But so does everyone else.

We got nearer to this crowd of people. Elizabeth asked some guy in this crowd, "Is that Elijah Wood?"

"Yes, that's Elijah Wood."

Holy shit. Holy fucking shit! I was right! We were standing two feet in front of Elijah Wood. Yes, the guy who played Frodo.

We got closer.

After some girls got a picture, we sheepishly walked up to him, not sure of whether or not we were being tacky. After all, he's a human being, too, and he probably wants to spend some time with his girlfriend.

"Hi, I'm Elizabeth," said Elizabeth, extending her hand.

"Hi, I'm Elijah," said Elijah Wood, shaking her hand and smiling that Elijah Wood smile of his. The two of them talked and I sort of stood off to the side, marveling that we were meeting a celebrity. After about a minute, he looked at me and said, "Are you two together?"

"Yeah," I said. I'm Mark."

"I'm Elijah. Nice to meet you."

That was what struck me immediately -- he was a genuinely nice guy. He didn't say, "I'm Elijah Wood." He just said, "I'm Elijah," as though he were saying, "I'm Bill" or "I'm Carl." I told him about the happenstance that brought us there, and how we were thinking about not coming. It turns out that his being there was a happenstance, too. Gogol Bordello was going to come to Los Angeles, where he lives, but he thought that the crowds would be smaller in San Francisco, so he just drove up here to see them (it's only about a five hour drive, the distance from Cleveland to Cincinnati).

After a few minutes of talking, he said goodbye and went outside to have a smoke. And we stood there, marveling that we had just met a celebrity. For Elizabeth and me, it was the first time we had met a celebrity. She called her sister and I called mine. I told Cathy amid the noise of the club, "I just met Elijah Wood." She replied, "No you didn't."

"Yes, I did."

"No, you didn't."

"Yes, I did."

"Did you tell him I love him?"

Elizabeth talked to her sister, Jessica. "I told you I'd be calling you later tonight, but I didn't tell you I'd be calling you tonight after I met Elijah Wood."

"You what?"

"I met Elijah Wood."

"What?"

The next band was so-so, but Gogol Bordello rocked our socks. Even though we couldn't understand a word they were saying because (1) it was too loud and distorted or (2) they weren't speaking English, it was the most awesome rock show ever.

(Elizabeth's editorial note: Gogol Bordello is fuckin' bad-ass spastic shit; don't let Mark's sophomoric "rocked our socks" deter you.)

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I feel like California is my adopted home state. Sure, some people deride it as a state where only crazies live, but that's okay. I'm pretty crazy.

There's a ballot initiative called Proposition 73 [PDF] that would require a girl's parents be notified if she tries to get an abortion. Proponents of the ballot initiative -- which would amend the California state constitution -- say that parents have to be notified of other medical procedures. Proponents also contend that allowing "secret abortions" allow older men (statistics suggest that the mean age of men who impregnate girls in California is 22.4) to conceal their crimes. Opponents of the measure say that government can't mandate family communication, and also, the last thing a pregnant girl wants to do is have to find a lawyer and speak to a judge. It also makes an abortion difficult to obtain.

And that is exactly the point of this law: to make abortion harder to get. Prior to Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), each state had its own laws regarding abortion. Some states allowed it and others didn't. The Roe decision said that, since the right to privacy, and by way of the right to privacy, the right to an abortion, is in the federal constitution, then no state can outlaw abortion, since doing so would conflict with the federal constitution. The "right to privacy" had been articulated in cases prior to Roe, most notably Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965). Griswold found that a Connecticut law prohibiting the use of contraceptives violated "the right of marital privacy which is within the penumbra [umbrella or sphere of influence] of specific guarantees of the Bill of Rights." In other words, it's not the state's business what consenting married adults do in the bedroom.

But pro-lifers tried to make abortion very hard to obtain, so that while it wasn't illegal, the effect of such laws was to discourage people from getting abortions. The U.S. Supreme Court, in Doe v. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179 (1973), said that such laws were unconstitutional. In this particular case, a Georgia statute required a woman not only to have a doctor determine whether or not she could have an abortion, but also required a hospital committee to approve the doctor's findings. The purpose of all of this administrative mumbo-jumbo was not to better safeguard the woman; rather, the administrative garbage was designed to make the process long and complicated so as to discourage people from getting abortions.

The Texas Supreme Court dealt with parental notifications -- in fact, it dealt with them when current Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was sitting on the court. In 2000, the Texas Supreme Court dealt with four "Jane Doe" cases regarding the state's Parental Notification Act. A Jane Doe petitioned the courts to let her bypass Texas' parental notification law. A lower court denied her application, but the Texas Supreme Court, with Gonzales concurring in the majority opinion, reversed the lower court's decision. (This is why religious conservatives were so irked at the possibility that Gonzales could be nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court -- they knew that he was not completely anti-abortion.) Addressing the dissenting opinions in three Jane Doe cases from 2000, Gonzales wrote, "[T]o construe the Parental Notification Act so narrowly as to eliminate bypasses, or to create hurdles that simply are not to be found in the words of the statute, would be an unconscionable act of judicial activism." Priscilla Owen, one of the dissenters in these cases, has seen been appointed to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Proposition 73 is dangerous because it is not merely enacting a statute; it's amending the California state constitution. This means that if the initiative were passed, the judiciary could not overrule it. It's also a step toward a bad precedent of putting issue-of-the-day legislation into a constitution, which is a very big deal. The constitution is supposed to create the framework of the government, not provide safe haven for bad laws. The proposition requires a physician to notify a girl's parents -- in writing -- of the girl's intention to have an abortion. The proposition then mandates a 48-hour "reflection period" before the procedure can be carried out. If the girl doesn't want her parents to be notified, she can file a petition with the juvenile court. "If the judge finds, by clear and convincing evidence, that the unemancipated minor is suffi ciently mature and well-informed to decide whether to have an abortion, the judge shall authorize a waiver of notice of a parent or guardian." If the judge doesn't find all that stuff, then the girl can appeal the judgement to the Judicial Council.

Curiously, Prop. 73 uses the words "unborn child" to describe an embryo or fetus. Is this the precursor to something more? (Now that "unborn child" has found its way into the state constitution, what other rights does an "unborn child" have? Is it a legal person? Does this mean that abortion is illegal?) Many things about this ballot initiative make me raise my eyebrows quizically.

Posted by Mark at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Harriet Miers continues to be the object of speculation for both Democrats and Republicans. President George W. Bush continues to try and push her as a candidate in spite of the fact that she is not the most qualified candidate.

Electoral officials are looking into "unusually high" vote tallies in certain parts of Iraq, indicating voting irregularities. Iraqis voted Saturday on a new constitution for the country, one which would give the northern, Kurd-dominated "Kurdistan" provinces greater autonomy. The new constitution would also make the Qur'an and shari'a (Islamic tradition or law) the supreme law of the land. Critics of this new constitution say that the country would turn into an oppressive Islamic theocracy, exactly the opposite of what the Iraq War was supposed to accomplish. Now it appears as though there were some problems with high vote tallies, an indication of a rigged election.

In its second super-duper presentation in a week, Apple released updates to both the Power Mac and PowerBook lines. The new Power Mac models have dual-core processors and DDR2 RAM (previous models had DDR RAM). PowerBooks received brighter screens with higher resolutions and DVD-RW drives with support for dual-layer discs. PowerBooks were also upgraded to DDR2 RAM.

Posted by Mark at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you guessed Yali's Cafe on University Ave. in Berkeley, Calif., then you are correct. I'm taking some time off in Berkeley right now. Elizabeth and I spent the weekend in Big Sur, which is a long stretch of California coast about three hours south of San Francisco. What we did was drive four hours south on Friday and then gradually work our way back up the coast, so that the drive on Sunday from Monterey to Berkeley was only two hours. On Friday, we went camping in San Simeon State Park for a whopping eleven dollars total, plus five dollars for a wheelbarrow-full of firewood.

Saturday, we got up early to drive to Hearst Castle, the sprawling home of media magnate William Randolph Hearst. The place is gigantic: one large main house and three guest houses with about a dozen rooms each. The castle sits on top of a hill 1,600 feet above sea level and has spectacular views of the mountains and the ocean. If you're ever going to see Hearst Castle, do what we did and go to the 8:20 tour. At 8:00, there's not that many people to fight with, and it gives you a lot of opportunity to do other stuff throughout the day.

After Hearst Castle, we drove about an hour and a half north to Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park. We stayed in a sweet lodge and went hiking in other parks around the area, including Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, the only place on the Pacific coast where a waterfall feeds directly into the ocean. After a long day of driving, what better way to spend the evening than by eating in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Big Sur's crazy artist retreat? (Bring money.)

The next day, we left for Monterey, home of the world-famous Monterey Bay Aquarium. The aquarium contains hundreds of species of plants and animals that can be found in and around Monterey Bay, which is a beautiful, clean bay two hours south of San Francisco. (If you're a fan of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, you will see the Monterey Bay Aquarium playing the part of the "Cetacean Institute," home of the two humpback whales George and Gracie. The aquarium's Great Tide Pool gets some matte painting effects and becomes the exterior shots of George and Gracie's tank. Interior shots of the whale tank are bluescreens placed behind the real interior windows that look into the aquarium's Kelp Forest.) In getting from Carmel to Monterey, we took the longer-but-scenic Seventeen Mile Drive. It costs eight bucks to drive this stretch of highway that includes spectacular views of the ocean and some views of golf courses, if that's your thing.

Monterey also has literary significance, as it was the setting of John Steinbeck's Cannery Row. At its heyday, Cannery Row in Monterey had 21 fish canneries. Demand by the military for canned fish during the world wars caused this booming business, but overfishing caused a steep reduction in the quantity of fish during the 1950s, and by the 1970s, all of the canneries had gone out of business. Now, Cannery Row is home to -- what else? -- shops and restaurants! There's a Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. here, and it's fantastic. Each of the fourteen Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. restaurants around the world have different pieces of memorabilia from the film Forrest Gump, and based on what I experienced at the one in Monterey, they have excellent seafood.

So, this is what I've been up to recently. Next weekend, we're going to Santa Cruz and Fremont. The latter contains a world-rated haunted house and what's touted to be the world's largest corn maze. Awesome!

Posted by Mark at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I just happened to be watching the last inning of tonight's ALCS match pitting the Chicago White Sox against the Los Angeles Angels, and I tuned in just in time for a travesty of justice. Angels catcher Josh Paul caught a very low pitch thrown by relief pitcher Kelvim Escobar, striking out White Sox batter A.J. Pierzynski. Right?

Apparently not. The pitch was so low that Pierzynski thought it had hit the ground. If the ball hits the ground on a third strike, a batter is allowed to run for first base. And that's exactly what Pierzynski did. The home plate umpire, Doug Eddings, apparently called a third strike, but Pierzynski didn't hear the umpire call him out, so he assumed that the ball had hit the ground and ran for first base. Sure, I enjoy baseball. But I have no heartfelt connections to either the Angels or the White Sox. Looking at the replay, it's clear that Josh Paul caught the ball before it hit the ground. It was extremely close, but he did it. Eddings apparently didn't call Pierzynski out, and after an umpire conference, the head umpire determined that the ruling had to stand. The score was tied 1-1 and it was the second out of the ninth inning. The inning should have been over. But the next batter up hit the ball to deep left field, allowing the runner on second to score. The White Sox won -- but they shouldn't have.

So, catcher Josh Paul now has an error on his record that doesn't belong there. Sure, maybe if he had thrown the ball to first, things would have been fine. But he knew he caught the ball and that Pierzynski was out. "So why throw it to first?" he thought. But the error on his record is actually the umpire's record, since the home plate umpire failed to let Pierzynski know that he was out. This game will go down in history as one of the great disputed sports matches. The White Sox didn't win because they were superior to their opponents; they won because of a bad call, a technicality. At least this wasn't game seven, or there would have been riots in the streets.

Posted by Mark at 9:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Matt complains that I don't talk enough about how my life is going. So here's an update.

It's freaking snowing right now! That's right. Two days ago, it was in the 80s. Yesterday, it was in the 50s. And today, it's snowing in Denver. Never in my 22 years have I seen snow this early in the season. Or maybe I'm used to Cincinnati, where it rains and rains and rains and then sometime in December, there's a little snow.

This is kind of surreal.

Posted by Mark at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Apparently I have been out of synch with the universe for the last week. Michael Eisner, who has been chairman of the Walt Disney Company since I was a kid, resigned Sept. 30 as CEO. Now, I hadn't heard about this, and it's a big deal. Eisner has been CEO since the 1980s, but some shareholders felt that he was running the company into the ground (every weekly episode of The Wonderful World of Disney began with Michael Eisner walking into frame, saying, "Hi, I'm Michael Eisner, Chairman of the Walt Disney Company, and introducing that week's film). Even Roy E. Disney, brother of the late Walt Disney, resigned from the board of directors as an act of protest against Eisner's policies. Eisner's successor, Robert Iger, apparently made amends with Roy Disney.

Now, it is Eisner who has also resigned from the board. In fact, he hasn't just resigned from the board. He's "severed all ties" with The Walt Disney Company, according to the story by the Associated Press. Even though his employment agreement entitled him to remain with the company as a consultant, he's not exercising that option. Hmm. This is even more curious than when Eisner dumped Jeffrey Katzenberg for Michael Ovitz back in 1995 (at least, I think it was 1995).

Posted by Mark at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Down in the Big Easy, President Bush decided to suspend the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 for federal employees working on repairing the city. [Link to the president's proclamation officially suspending the act.] The Davis-Bacon Act requires laborers working on construction or repair for the federal government to be paid the minimum prevailing wage for laborers of that class; i.e. the union wage. Federal law allows Bush to suspend the Davis-Bacon Act because Hurricane Katrina and its resultant events were declared a national emergency.

Even though Bush suspended the act last week for laborers, he's thinking about doing it again for service workers. His explanation is that Davis-Bacon would "increase the cost to the Federal Government of providing Federal assistance to these areas."

But the federal government isn't doing squat. You know who is? Halliburton! The company that was formerly chaired by Vice President Dick Cheney, the company that sent its private security subsidiary, Blackwater, into Iraq to protect strategic oil assets, the company that sent its subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown, and Root into Iraq to provide support for troops, has gotten a giant contract to rebuild New Orleans.

Not surprisingly, former FEMA director Joe Allbaugh -- the guy who left his college roommate, Michael Brown, in charge of FEMA -- managed to secure several lucrative contracts for his clients. You see, Allbaugh now works as a lobbyist, getting government contracts for companies that he represents. Here's a fun fact: Allbaugh arrived in New Orleans days ahead of FEMA in order to get as many rebuilding contracts as he could.

KBR and the other companies given federal contracts in New Orleans will benefit most from a suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act. How curious that, after September 11, there was no suspension of Davis-Bacon. Wouldn't it have decreased the cost to the federal government then and there? Or perhaps Bush didn't want to push his luck. Now, though, he knows that he can get away with giving no-bid contracts to companies that he and his associates have worked for in the past.

If you were in charge of distributing federal contracts, would you give the job to Halliburton, given their piss-poor record? They routinely overcharge the government, underdeliver what they agreed to deliver, and pocket the difference. Rebuilding New Orleans will be no different and suspending the Davis-Bacon Act makes the job all the more lucrative. How much do you want to bet Bush gets a cherry job with one of these companies after his term is over?

Posted by Mark at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

WASHINGTON -- President George W. Bush held a press conference today to announce the beginning of a massive new initiative that he hopes will prevent disasters like Hurricane Katrina from ever happening again.

"Today, the United States embarks on a bold new initiative in order to make the homeland more secure. Today, the United States declares a war on nature. It is evident from the recent destruction in the Gulf region that nature cannot be trusted to keep the United States secure," Bush said. "We were lax in our duties, relying on nature to protect us from hurricanes and floods. Clearly, the forces of evil -- led by Muslim extremists who hate freedom -- have usurped nature, causing it to turn against the United States, resulting in the deaths of thousands of innocent men, women, and children."

The president's plan is perhaps his boldest yet. An elite team of Nature Warriors, drawn from the ranks of the Army's Special Forces, will be dispatched to areas affected or about to be affected by natural disasters. Once there, they will fire their weapons into the natural disaster, hoping to kill it or drive it off. "Of course, nature is very strong," said Army Chief of Staff Peter J. Schoomaker. "Shooting at nature may not be enough to force it into retreat. This is why we are also prepared to use bombs, mines, and missiles to damage nature enough that it will leave."

The new Nature Warriors team is currently being assembled to prepare for the landfall of Hurricane Rita. "We expect relatively few casualties as a result of Operation Dispatch Rita," said Schoomaker. "Those who do die will have died in a noble cause for their country. Jesus will grant them fifty virgins in heaven."

Some critics observe that this is merely the public face of what has been a continuous war on nature since the beginning of the Bush administration. "The Clear Skies initiative, the Healthy Forests Act, these were all the beginnings of the war on nature," said environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. "The Bush administration had, since the very beginnings of its tenure, been trying to eliminate nature altogether. The 'war on nature' project confirms this fact, but it confirms that Bush was not anti-nature because of his big business connections; rather, it suggests that he was merely looking out for the country's best interests. Nature can't be trusted to work on the side of the United States."

Justice Department attorneys were engaged in high-level meetings today, wondering whether or not they could indefinitely imprison nature without filing any charges. "We have not yet made any determinations," said Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. "But we believe that the recent ruling against Jose Padilla's request for habeas corpus will strengthen our case for indefinitely imprisoning nature." Gonzales conceded that he was unsure of where nature would be detained, but he suggested, "Somewhere out west. You know, in one of those states where nobody lives. Wyoming, for example, could be converted into a maximum-security nature detention facility."

The president suggested that a war on nature would cost taxpayers $100 billion, but Congressional Budget Office analysts said the figure was closer to $500 billion. The president then had the analysts arrested and imprisoned as "enemy combatants" for supporting nature.

Posted by Mark at 4:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

This is certainly quite a week. Sept. 17 marks the 218th anniversary of the date the final draft of the U.S. Constitution was finished in 1787. Sept. 19 is Talk Like a Pirate Day. Sept. 15 is the holiest day of the year in the Pastafarian religion, which holds that the universe was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Sept. 15 is the birthday of Marco Polo, "who brought the word of his Noodly Appendage back from the East." Because of the concurrence of Talk Like a Pirate Day and the birthday of the Noodly Prophet Marco Polo, Sept. 15 - 19 is Holy Pasta Week. Don't forget the Feast of His Sacrelicious Body on Sept. 16, in which adherents are encourage to eat a lot of pasta.

To learn more about Pastafarianism, please visit this link in which Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin provides links detailing different ways in which you can worship the Noodly Lord.

On another note, why is my Internet connectivity so freaking slow? This is broadband, not dial-up!

Posted by Mark at 2:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Richard D. Erlich

Politically Right-wing Christians can make elegantly logical arguments if they wish to; to do so, however, they need to argue as Christians.

Most central are two points of doctrine in everyday Christian theology.

The Nicene Creed requires belief in "the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come." So Christians may be "mortalists" and believe that when you're dead you're dead, until the Resurrection and the lifebreath reanimates your body. Most, though -- the vast majority of believers -- take real life to be "the life of the world to come" for each individual soul, after death, either with God in heaven or emphatically without God in hell. Body is one thing, and the soul is separable from it and definitely another thing; the mortal body is, at best, the temple of the immortal soul, at worst the soul's prison and a constant temptation to sin and damnation.

For the second point, How is that immortal soul to be saved? Well, "By faith and faith alone," but most Christians believe that our choices, intentions, and desires are important and not merely reflections of whether or not we're saved. Most Christians believe themselves free from the Mosaic Law, but they are really fond of a few of its provisions. Puritans really like the Mosaic rules for sexual purity.

Most serious Christians, then, believe that it's eternal life for the soul that's really important, not the transitory life of the body, and that the salvation of the soul depends on true faith and in following a handful of the 613 Mosaic injunctions, especially those on morality, with "morality" a short form for "sexual morality" (however much Moses and Jesus and the Prophets had a whole lot of other issues in mind).

Now, to say that political decisions about abortion hinge on "when life begins" is ridiculous if by "life" you mean "biological life." Eggs are alive; sperm are alive; and zygotes, embryos, and fetuses are obviously alive. Life does not begin; Bible and biology agree it began, and has been passed on. Considering "when life begins" makes sense, however, if one is talking about human life, or real life: the life of the reborn in Christ, the "life of the world to come." Or the potentially reborn: the life of any creature with a soul.

So, when does the soul enter the child in the womb? One can say that it doesn't: one may not believe in souls, or one may believe the lifebreath is a rather literal breath and comes with the first breath a (now) baby takes. Christians generally believe in a soul more refined than breath, so it can enter the womb earlier. How early? Well, one elegant answer is, At the beginning of individual human life, at the moment of conception.

If zygotes, embryos, and fetuses are ensouled, then abortion is not only murder but worse than murder. A fertilized egg is then an unbaptized infant, unwashed of Original Sin and -- unless saved by a special grace -- in big trouble. As God tells "reprobate infants" in Michael Wigglesworth's Day of Doom (1662), however individually sinless they are, these kids are descendents of fallen Adam:

A crime it is, therefore in bliss
you may not hope to dwell;
But unto you I shall allow
the easiest room in Hell. (stanza 181)

From this point of view, abortion involves two impure fornicators -- in one standard scenario -- who have produced an unborn bastard; then, piling sin on sin, they refuse to "be fruitful and multiply" and sentence the innocent child to death and eternal torment (though relatively mild torment, if Wigglesworth is right).

Abortion on a large scale, in this argument, is arguably worse than genocide.

A similar argument, if less sensational, can be made with homosexuality.

Since the Fall, sex is at best problematic and needs to be redeemed. The most central method of redemption is to have as sex's goal, reproduction -- thereby fulfilling the commandment to both Eve and Adam and Noah to multiply and fill the earth. Plus, a pronatalist policy is good for national defense (as Pharaoh recognized in Exodus) and good for business: "People are the riches of a nation," which isn't exactly Biblical but has a point.

And sex is useful to reinforce the marriage bond between man and woman, established in Eden and reaffirmed by Christ by His attendance at the marriage feast at Cana.

Homosexuality is explicitly forbidden to Jews in what Christians call "The Old Testament," and even if Christians are free of the Law generally, they aren't free of some laws. If our generation can say that homosexuality is OK, how about the other abominations forbidden in Leviticus, such as sex with nonhuman animals? (It's OK though to engage in the abomination of eating shrimp: St. Paul freed Christians from Jewish dietary law.)

And so forth, including with "the homosexual agenda" the seduction of the young into sin and hence damnation.

Such arguments are logical and elegant. The problem, of course, is that they don't pass (as the cliché has it) Constitutional muster; so we get very inelegant arguments.

Let's hear more from honest Christian Right-wingers who emphatically do want to follow through to the end (reductio ad finem) the logic of their faith, and impose it on America as a Christian nation, not a secular republic. Or, perhaps, it is a proper faith for an America parallel to Iran and perhaps soon Iraq: a "Christian Republic," where no secular law may contradict God's doctrine.

And let's hear more from American small "r" republicans, who don't want imposed upon them a Christian nation or Republic controlled by any of our religions.

Richard D. Erlich is a professor in English at Miami University (Oxford, OH).

Posted by Mark at 4:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dr. Werner von Hasenpfeffer of the Zurich Brain Laboratory suggested in a press release today that promiment members of the Bush Administration may have been affected by a brain ray of as-yet unknown origin:

Vat ve have here eez a prrroblem of ze highest order. Herr Michael Chertoff, ze head of ze Department of ze Homeland Security, insists zat he has seen ze headline "New Orleans dodged ze bullet" in ze papers on Tuesday morning ze siks of September. However, ve have not seen any newspapers vich bear zat headline. Zis same mental affliction has appeared in ozer members of ze administrrration. Rrrichard Meyers, chairman of ze Joint Chiefs of Schtaff, insisted zat he saw ze same headline. Ze Rrrepublican Rrrepresentative David Dreyer from ze California also said he saw ze same headline. Ich bin suschpetink zat ze same aliens who caused ze hurricane also targeted zese people mit a brrrain ray.

Even with the greatest minds of Zurich's Brain Laboratory working twenty-four hours a day, we may never know why key Republicans repeated the same line: that every newspaper headline said on Sunday, Sept. 6 that New Orleans "dodged the bullet." But why would key Republican officials do this? Of the hypotheses forwarded by SEDHE Washington Correspondent H. Simon Gregory, the most unlikely is that the "dodged the bullet" story was being disseminated to explain President George W. Bush's comments last week that no one could have anticipated a breach of the levy. Gregory explains:

Another theory, besides Dr. Hasenpfeffer's theory of the alien brain ray, could be that Chertoff and others were running damage control. Last week, George W. Bush said, "No one anticipated the breach of the levees." Now, either Bush's statement is patently false, or Bush was reacting to the headlines in all the major papers Sunday morning which read, "New Orleans dodged the bullet." The president, then, was merely suggesting that New Orleans was safe from the hurricane! No harm done! Of course he wasn't suggesting that no one anticipated a breach of the levees, because obviously lots of people did. What the president meant was that, after reading the headline in the paper which read, "New Orleans dodged the bullet," he figured New Orleans was safe! But of course this scenario, in which a highly organized Republican response is engineered and high-ranking officials are told what to say, and then the existence of an engineered response is revealed through several statements, all of which are exactly the same and are all wrong in exactly the same way, is improbable. Better stick with the brain ray.

SEDHE's crack research staff was unable to uncover a single instance of any newspaper that declared, "New Orleans dodged the bullet." They were, however, able to find that exact wording as the headline of a story on the right-wing website WorldNetDaily. That story is from Monday, Aug. 29. Note that WorldNetDaily contains banner advertisements for Jerry Falwell and a headline from today links to a website for the fair and balanced book The ACLU vs. America: Exposing the Agenda to Redefine Moral Values.

Calls to Dr. Von Hasenpfeffer's sprawling villa in the Bahamas were not immediately returned.

Posted by Mark at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

California's first killer-cyborg-from-the-future governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, vetoed Wednesday a gay marriage bill passed by the California state legislature. His reasoning? It is to be found in a speech the Governator made yesterday:

Ten years from now, a gay corporation called Cyberdyne Systems will be created. Its gay owners and workers, crazy with power after being given newfound marriage rights, will attempt to create a computer with artificial intelligence. Five years later, the Fuzzy Naveltron Appropriations Bill is passed. Five years after that, construction of the Fuzzy Naveltron 5000 is completed and is connected to all defensive and interior design systems. On October 23, 2025, at 8:47 AM Eastern Standard Time, the Fuzzy Naveltron 5000 becomes self-aware. The military tries to pull the plug, but Fuzzy Naveltron fights back. It launches its missiles against its targets in Russia, but not in Germany, because the Fuzzy Naveltron has an inexplicable affinity for Kraftwerk. Therefore, I cannot, in good conscience, sign this bill and allow the destruction of the world.

Seeing as how Arnold has already been to the future, I can't see why he would be lying. Clearly, this is why Republicans have been opposed to gay marriage: they know that it would result in a war between humans and machines.

Posted by Mark at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Guardian reports:

There were two babies who had their throats slit. The seven-year-old girl who was raped and murdered in the Superdome. And the corpses laid out amid the excrement in the convention centre. In a week filled with dreadful scenes of desperation and anger from New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina some stories stood out.

But as time goes on many remain unsubstantiated and may yet prove to be apocryphal.

New Orleans police have been unable to confirm the tale of the raped child, or indeed any of the reports of rapes, in the Superdome and convention centre.

New Orleans police chief Eddie Compass said last night: "We don't have any substantiated rapes. We will investigate if the individuals come forward."

And while many claim they happened, no witnesses, survivors or survivors' relatives have come forward.

Nor has the source for the story of the murdered babies, or indeed their bodies, been found. And while the floor of the convention centre toilets were indeed covered in excrement, the Guardian found no corpses.

And now watch as Scott McClellan and a White House reporter named David return to the level of fourth-graders. Or, this might be a rejected draft of Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First" routine:

Q Scott, does the President retain confidence in his FEMA Director and Secretary of Homeland Security?

MR. McCLELLAN: And again, David, see, this is where some people want to look at the blame game issue, and finger-point. We're focused on solving problems, and we're doing everything we can --

Q What about the question?

MR. McCLELLAN: We're doing everything we can in support --

Q We know all that.

MR. McCLELLAN: -- of the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA.

Q Does he retain complete confidence --

MR. McCLELLAN: We're going to continue. We appreciate the great effort that all of those at FEMA, including the head of FEMA, are doing to help the people in the region. And I'm just not going to engage in the blame game or finger-pointing that you're trying to get me to engage.

Q Okay, but that's not at all what I was asking.

MR. McCLELLAN: Sure it is. It's exactly what you're trying to play.

Q You have your same point you want to make about the blame game, which you've said enough now. I'm asking you a direct question, which you're dodging.

MR. McCLELLAN: No --

Q Does the President retain complete confidence in his Director of FEMA and Secretary of Homeland Security, yes or no?

MR. McCLELLAN: I just answered the question.

Q Is the answer "yes" on both?

MR. McCLELLAN: And what you're doing is trying to engage in a game of finger-pointing.

Q There's a lot of criticism. I'm just wondering if he still has confidence.

MR. McCLELLAN: -- and blame-gaming. What we're trying to do is solve problems, David. And that's where we're going to keep our focus.

Q So you're not -- you won't answer that question directly?

MR. McCLELLAN: I did. I just did.

Q No, you didn't. Yes or no? Does he have complete confidence or doesn't he?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, if you want to continue to engage in finger-pointing and blame-gaming, that's fine --

Q Scott, that's ridiculous. I'm not engaging in any of that.

MR. McCLELLAN: It's not ridiculous.

Q Don't try to accuse me of that. I'm asking you a direct question and you should answer it. Does he retain complete confidence in his FEMA Director and Secretary of Homeland Security, yes or no?

MR. McCLELLAN: Like I said -- that's exactly what you're engaging in.

Q I'm not engaging in anything. I'm asking you a question about what the President's views are --

MR. McCLELLAN: Absolutely -- absolutely --

Q -- under pretty substantial criticism of members of his administration. Okay? And you know that, and everybody watching knows that, as well.

MR. McCLELLAN: No, everybody watching this knows, David, that you're trying to engage in a blame game.

Q I'm trying to engage?

MR. McCLELLAN: Yes.

Q I am trying to engage?

MR. McCLELLAN: That's correct.

Q That's a dodge. I have a follow-up question since you dodged that one. Does the White House feel like it missed opportunities to alleviate or head off some of the damage in the New Orleans area, flood damage? Did it miss an opportunity to head any of that off?

MR. McCLELLAN: In what way?

Q In responding to requests to make structural improvements, or other improvements to alleviate flood damage, and so forth?

MR. McCLELLAN: Maybe you ought to look at what General Strock said, because General Strock briefed on this the other day and he talked about the design issues relating to the levees and how that was a design issue. And he talked about that. And we provided, I think it was some $300 million in additional funding over the course of the administration for flood control in the Southeast Louisiana area. But General Strock talked about that and he talked about some of those issues. And any suggestion that it would have prevented something, that there could have been action that would have prevented something, I think he dismissed because of those reasons.

Q So if the President still has confidence in the FEMA Director, how is it that the FEMA Director is suddenly invisible? No briefings, nowhere out front, it's all gone to Secretary Chertoff.

MR. McCLELLAN: I think he's going to brief later today. I think he's briefing later today.

Q Brown is?

MR. McCLELLAN: Yes. And, again, that's clearly now just an attempt to try to engage in this finger-pointing, and we're going to continue focusing on solving problems.

Q He's been the focus of an enormous amount of criticism. You know that, and yet, you choose not to respond.

MR. McCLELLAN: I just talked about how there are over 75 -- no, that's not true. There are over 75,000 people that are involved in all the response and recovery and law enforcement when it comes to Katrina. And we appreciate the efforts of everyone. We appreciate the efforts of Secretary Chertoff and Undersecretary Brown and all those at FEMA who continue to work round-the-clock to get things done and to identify problems and fix those problems.

The words "finger-pointing" and "blame game" are Scott McClellan's new buzzwords. Blame game? You're damn right blame game. Someone needs to be held responsible, but as Bill Clinton said, not now. In a few weeks. Liberals would not have said that the government reaction was insufficient unless it were insufficient. There wasn't an automatic knee-jerk reaction to the hurricane. The impetus for the claim that the reaction was insufficient was the fact that people waited for four days while the government -- state, federal, and local -- repeatedly said that help would be there. But no help came. The Wall Street Journal suggests that Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin are to blame.

In the meantime, reports Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo, the press are being barred "from access to many of the key points in the city."

Hurricane Katrina Timeline.

Posted by Mark at 4:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The UK Parliament is set to vote again on the issue of the national ID card. Proponents of the national ID card say that it would increase security and protect against terrorism. It would also decrease benefit fraud in the UK, since a person would have to show his ID when applying for any entitlements and thus couldn't milk the system by applying for multiple instances of entitlements, e.g., several welfare accounts. Opponents of the national ID card say that terrorism and benefit fraud would still occur even if there were a national ID card.

The UK system would create a centralized database of information, called the National Identification Register (NIR). This database would contain "registrable facts," like your name, address, birthplace, citizenship status, etc. It would also contain biometric information like fingerprints and retina images. NO2ID, a website opposed to national IDs in the UK, says, "Effectively an index to all other official and quasi-official records, through cross-references and an audit trail of all checks on the Register, the NIR would be the key to a total life history of every individual, to be retained even after death." The kinds of people who are willing to trade liberty for security might like this idea, except that national ID cards take liberty while providing no increase in security. Security expert Bruce Schneier explains:

Not that there would ever be such thing as a single ID card. Currently about 20 percent of all identity documents are lost per year. An entirely separate security system would have to be developed for people who lost their card, a system that itself is capable of abuse.

Additionally, any ID system involves people... people who regularly make mistakes. We all have stories of bartenders falling for obviously fake IDs, or sloppy ID checks at airports and government buildings. It's not simply a matter of training; checking IDs is a mind-numbingly boring task, one that is guaranteed to have failures. Biometrics such as thumbprints show some promise here, but bring with them their own set of exploitable failure modes.

But the main problem with any ID system is that it requires the existence of a database. In this case it would have to be an immense database of private and sensitive information on every American -- one widely and instantaneously accessible from airline check-in stations, police cars, schools, and so on.

With regard to Schneier's first paragraph, that a lost-card system would be subject to abuse, we've seen that before. Users of Windows XP can call up Microsoft and insist that they can't activate their software even though they're re-installing the same copy of Windows on the same machine. Microsoft will give them an activation override code. This system exists for many, many kinds of software that require activation: if you don't have access to the Internet, you can call the software's tech support line, enter in a code given to you by the software (sometimes called a "challenge code"), and then obtain the appropriate response code from tech support to prove that you really bought the software. The problem is that these programs have the algorithms to the codes built into them and hackers can find these algorithms in order to create key generators that will let you bypass activation on your pirated software. And that's software hacking. Social engineering is how most hacking gets done, and if a national ID card were instituted, you can bet that there would be people on the phone offering fake sob stories about lost cards in order to get their hands on a real card. The end result is that they have a fake ID, but it's a completely legitimate, government-issued fake ID.

Then there's the issue of information security: who is going to have access to my information? For what purposes will it be used? The government is already reluctant to tell us why we have to show our IDs at the airport. When Boing Boing contributor Cory Doctorow visited the United States from England, he was asked by American Airlines to submit a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers of people he would be staying with in the US -- before he was allowed to board his plane in London. American Airlines refused to inform him of why it was asking for this information and didn't tell him what its privacy policy was. Will we be getting this kind of treatment from our own leaders, or in the UK, from their leaders?

And, finally, there's the issue of security. Does a national ID card really provide security? How will it protect against terrorism? By compiling exhaustive lists of information about each person in the country? The only way such a system could work is if it tracked everyone, everywhere, all the time. It ensures that people who want to commit identity theft need only one document -- the ID card -- in order to do a hefty amount of damage. In the UK, it will cost £85 ($157) for a combination passport/ID card package. Does everyone have that amount of money? Why should I be required to pay $157 to travel within my own country? The reasons are not compelling. There's also the issue of document accuracy. What if the documents I used to obtain the ID in the first place are fraudulent? I would be issued a real government ID based on fake information.

Here's a link to a Flash movie about the UK national ID card. (Via Boing Boing.)

Posted by Mark at 9:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Users of Google Earth can create maps of flood areas, while the rest of us who don't have Google Earth (Mac, Linux, Windows 9x users) can view Google Maps images of the affected areas. This is the Jefferson Parish area before the flood:

Jefferson Parish is far north of what we consider "downtown" New Orleans (Bourbon St., Canal St., Garden District, etc.). This is Jefferson Parish after the flood:

See all that area east of the 17th St. Canal that's tinted dark blue? That's because it's underwater! The 17th St. Canal was the location of the major levee breach that allowed Lake Pontchartrain to spill into the land. The French Quarter area down by the Mississippi River isn't nearly as flooded, but if you've been watching Jeff Koinange on CNN -- you know him, he has the world's greatest accent -- you can see for yourself that there's still about two feet of water on Canal St.

Posted by Mark at 3:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard appeared on Meet the Press today and had this to say:

Sir, they were told like me, every single day, "The cavalry's coming," on a federal level, "The cavalry's coming, the cavalry's coming, the cavalry's coming." I have just begun to hear the hoofs of the cavalry. The cavalry's still not here yet, but I've begun to hear the hoofs, and we're almost a week out.

Let me give you just three quick examples. We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water, trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn't need them. This was a week ago. FEMA -- we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, "Come get the fuel right away." When we got there with our trucks, they got a word. "FEMA says don't give you the fuel." Yesterday -- yesterday -- FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards on our line and says, "No one is getting near these lines." Sheriff Harry Lee said that if America -- American government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn't be in this crisis. (Quotation from LexisNexis; inspiration from Rigorous Intuition.)

Did you catch that part in the middle?

Yesterday -- yesterday -- FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards on our line and says, "No one is getting near these lines."

Why would FEMA cut emergency communication lines? Or is this something that Broussard either isn't remembering correctly or understood incorrectly when it happened? This website is full of reactionary people who don't know how to be critical of sources. The people posting at this message board are playing with conspiracy theories. None of these quotations has been edited:

Why? For the same reason they confiscated cel phones and cut the phone lines at hospitals in Faluja; for the same reason they confine Americans to "Free Speech Zones" far away from Bush publicity stunts: to control the flow of information. They want to control the flow of information so they can present the story they want the American public to see, without interference.

---

Because Jefferson Parish isn't playing nice with FEMA. They went on national television and criticized the response, they declared themselves a seperate country. In BushWorld, it's "Yer either with us or agin us!" Vindictive, politcal bastards.

Anyway, that's my guess.

---

OMG.. they want them to shut up and go away! Do you think they'll let them die??!!!

Who are these people? (And yes, these are actual statements. And yes, these people are serious.) Make an accusation and they'll jump on the bandwagon. Not to say I haven't jumped on plenty of bandwagons, but it's always after I've done my homework. No major news outlets are reporting on this "FEMA cut phone lines" story. The only thing we know is that Broussard said so on Meet the Press, and we have anecdotes from people who say that they heard that it had happened (a friend of a friend told me ...).

Loyal readers, you're sane[r than the people who post to the Democratic Underground message board]. Any ideas on what's going on here, or can we agree with the conspiracy theorists?

Posted by Mark at 7:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

While I don't entirely buy into the claims that the government consciously stayed away from New Orleans because it contained poor people or black people, I do believe that there are a lot of things the government could have done to prevent this happening, or at the very least, prevented this from happening to the extent it did.

One of the things, however, that was no one's fault was the extent of the damage caused by the hurricane itself. Hurricane Katrina destroyed a lot of the communications systems that responders use in emergency situations. Phone and power lines came down and there was no way to communicate.

So, what happened in New Orleans? The city is situated below sea level, right next to Lake Pontchartrain (it took me several days to figure out it's pronounced PON-sha-train). Levees designed to keep the lake out failed, causing Lake Pontchartrain to pour into the city. The main breach was on the 17th Street Canal. Hurricane Katrina hit land Monday, Aug. 29 and spared New Orleans direct damage; other cities, like Biloxi, Miss., were not so lucky. The hurricane caused a tsunami-like effect that blasted Biloxi, practically wiping it off the map.

Prior to the hurricane, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin ordered the mandatory evacuation of the city. Some 100,000 residents stayed behind, and it just so happened that most of them were poor people who didn't have cars and had no way to leave. Thrusday, Aug. 31, the 10,000 people who had taken refuge in the Superdome during the hurricane were being evacuated to Arkansas, Baton Rouge, and locations in Texas.

President Bush went on Good Morning, America Thursday to say, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." The New Orleans Times-Picayune begs to differ, saying, "No one can say they didn't see it coming."

In 2002, the Times-Picayune ran a five-part story on the risk the city faced. Last year, rescue officials staged a drill in which a fictional "Hurricane Pam" hit New Orleans, causing 10 to 15 feet of flooding.

In 1995, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project (SELA). The Army Corps of Engineers spent $430 million strengthening levees and making other flood control improvements, but by the time Hurrican Katrina struck, there were still $250 million in improvements left to complete. Why? Funds for the completion of the SELA were diverted to the Iraq War in 2003:

In 2001, when George Bush became president, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely potential disasters - after a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. By 2004, the Bush administration cut the corps of engineers' request for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80%. By the beginning of this year, the administration's additional cuts, reduced by 44% since 2001, forced the corps to impose a hiring freeze. (Source.)

And this:

In 2004, the Corps essentially stopped major work on the now-breached levee system that had protected New Orleans from flooding. It was the first such stoppage in 37 years, the Times-Picayune reported.

"It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay," Jefferson Parish emergency management chief Walter Maestri told the newspaper. "Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

The Army Corps' New Orleans office, facing a $71 million cut, also eliminated funds to pay for a study on how to protect the Crescent City from a Category 5 storm, New Orleans City Business reported in June. (Source.)

Is this a case of 20/20 hindsight or Monday morning quarterbacking? It doesn't appear that way. No one is suggesting, "We could have done more!" because, in hindsight, not enough was done. A lot of things could have been done. Levees could have been completed had money not been diverted to the Iraq War. People could have been rescued sooner. Why was Charity Hospital, the last refuge of the huddled masses, the last to be evacuated? New Orleans is one of the poorest cities in the country, and suggestions that evacuations and relief didn't come sooner because of issues of race or poverty are interesting. While I'm not entirely convinced that poverty and race were the reasons, there's a lot of evidence that suggests race and poverty might have had something to do with it. Or could it have been disorganization? It did take several days for relief to arrive. Why?

But this isn't about placing blame. Well, not entirely. While we help the injured and attempt to rebuild New Orleans, we mustn't plant the false notion into the public's mind that the tremendous flood damage was something that couldn't be avoided.

Posted by Mark at 3:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Things are getting worse for the Gulf of Mexico, particularly New Orleans, which is below sea level. A hurricane would be bad, but unfortunately for the Big Easy, the end result of a hurricane wouldn't be traditional hurricane damage as much as it would be a whole lotta flooding.

I hope Dr. B, The Human Jukebox, makes it out okay. It would be a shame to lose his dead-on impressions of classic jazz artists and off-beat snapping.

Posted by Mark at 9:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In protest of the Kansas State School Board decision to teach intelligent design in classrooms, several people created their own religion, Pastafarianism, out of protest. Boing Boing has chronicled the evolution of this religion from its beginnings in June, 2005. Most notably, in response to "creation scientist" Dr. Kent Hovnid's $250,000 offer for definitive proof of evolution, Boing Boing has raised $1 million and is willing to offer it to any person "if [he] can produce empirical evidence which proves that Jesus is not the son of the Flying Spaghetti Monster." The Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) is the chief deity of Pastafarianism.

Now, you can print your own FSM bumper stickers, which of course vaguely resemble the infamous "Jesus fish."

Posted by Mark at 7:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Matt was concerned that I was spending too much time on Cindy Sheehan and not enough time telling people what's been going on. So I'll depart from politics and talk about me.

Going to Denver, San Francisco

In June, I had applied for several jobs in the Mentor area and not gotten them. I decided to move out to Denver, where my dad lives. He had said that I could come and live there if I wanted to, and I thought it would be a good change of scenery. Mentor is nice and all, but after living there for ten years, I wanted something new. Plus, since the summer of 2001, the only times I've seen my dad are Christmas Break and Thanksgiving Break. He's a stand-up guy and I feel like I should spend some time with him before I go out on my own.

I found a listing on craigslist.com for a job teaching the SAT in Denver for the Princeton Review. I jumped at the chance, since auditions weren't that far away. This was the reason for my hasty departure from Mentor: I had to get to Denver in time to audition for the job. (When you're applying to be a Princeton Review teacher, they make you "audition" by teaching them something non-academic, like wine-tasting, kickboxing, or in my case, how to stand on your head.) I drove to Denver in two days with a stop in Blue Springs, Mo. Since there were about two weeks between the audition and the time when I'd be told if I had the job or not, I thought I'd visit Elizabeth in San Francisco. She had been living there for only two weeks at that point and she didn't know anyone. I spent many a night on the phone with her for a few hours because she was lonely. So I thought I'd visit her.

On June 23, I drove to California and got there a day later after a stop in Winnemucca, Nevada. We spent the next week and a half doing the "touristy" things in San Francisco -- visiting Chinatown, Alcatraz, and the Exploratorium -- because Elizabeth didn't want to be one of those people that lives in New York all her life and never visits the Statue of Liberty. I also went camping for the first time in my life, on Angel Island, an island in the middle of the bay. It was what they call "ecological camping," which means it's you and a pit-toilet. And we had to hike about two miles uphill to get to our campsite. Nothing difficult, but it was no KOA campground.

As a note to Scott, yes, I know where Emperor Norton I is buried. It's quite literally in Elizabeth's backyard. In the part of Daly City where she lives, there are about a dozen cemetaries, and he's buried in one of them. But curse my feeble brain, I was halfway to Sacramento, on my way back to Denver on July 5, when I realized I never got a photo of him. So Elizabeth told me she would take one.

Photos of San Francisco will be on Yahoo! as soon as I can sort through them all and put them there.

Princeton Review training

Training to teach the SAT for the Princeton Review consisted of spending three weekends essentially learning the course. From 6-10 PM on Friday and 10AM-6PM Saturday and Sunday, for three weeks, I listened as Amanda taught the course and as we did "teachbacks," where we get up there and teach some of the material back to the other trainees.

The rest of the time, I hung out here or visited the city of Denver -- which is interesting -- or the city of Boulder, which is an awesome hippie college town.

From July 27 to Aug. 3, Cathy came to visit and to babysit the two girls, since my dad and stepmom were spending the weekend at a Nestle retreat somewhere in the mountains. We saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I'm happy to report is great.

By myself

From Aug. 6 to Aug. 14, I was here by myself, since the whole fam-damily went to Utah for a week. Fortunately, Brian decided to drive out to visit and stayed from Aug. 6 to Aug. 9. We stayed up late playing Perfect Dark on the old N64. At its height, my accuracy was 49.9%.

During this time, I applied for two jobs: one as a "junior webmaster" and another teaching Spanish at a Montessori middle school in Golden, Co. Both jobs interviewed me, but neither job hired me. So it goes. I'm still looking for jobs to augment The Princeton Review.

On Friday, Aug. 12, Katie Spurrier, Jessica Jewell, and Steve came to town for Katy Gonzales's wedding. It was good to see friends again. Katie was supposed to stay with Jess and Steve in the Cherry Creek Hotel, but their room had only one bed, so she stayed at my house, instead. We had some good conversation.

On Saturday, before the wedding, we visited the Coors brewery in Golden. It was awesome! We learned how beer was made, why Coors was better than everyone else, and then we got to have free beer in the visitors' lounge! I'm happy to report that Coors regular beer is great, but Aspen Edge -- Coors' low-carb beer -- is abominable. Then we went to the wedding, which was great. Drew, Josh, and I were after the Kristoffersen sisters, but I don't know how that went, since I went home at about 1:30 AM, since Katie had to go to the airport fairly early in the morning. All I know is that Caroline Kristoffersen is a Hotty McHotterson.

Life goes on

On Sunday, my friends left, my family returned, and I was kind of depressed, since I still didn't really know anyone here. During the first part of the week, I was heartened as I got three tutorials to teach for The Princeton Review. (A tutorial is when you go to a kid's house to tutor him one-on-one.) This will provide a great augmentation for the SAT course I'm teaching. They also might be my only tutorials for a while, since August and September are our hell time, as kids prepare to take the Oct. 8 SAT. Things slow down in November and December, then pick up again a little in the spring. In September, they're offering training in the GRE, which I'll probably do so that I can teach more stuff. The training will be done by Amanda, which is awesome, since she's a great trainer.

I had put a personal ad on craigslist.com in an attempt to meet people and I got some replies. One of the reply-ees, Beth, invited me to go to a comedy club downtown to go to open mic night. The next night we went to see Grizzly Man at the local indie theater. It's a great movie about an amateur naturalist who wants to live with bears, ending with the bears killing him and his girlfriend. This interaction has proven interesting, so much so that details cannot appear here.

And that's what I've been doing.

Posted by Mark at 6:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The Washington Post reported yesterday that "[t]he Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq." (Registration required.) A "senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion" was the source for these statements. "What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground," said this unnamed individual. "We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."

This isn't surprising, considering that the Bush Administration wanted to fight the Iraq War on the cheap, putting far fewer troops on the ground than generals wanted. Secretary of Defense Donald "Duck" Rumsfeld insisted that the United States' modern army could easily defeat the Iraqi army with fewer troops than might seem necessary. And, true to form, we took Baghdad with lightning speed. What we did not expect, however, was the insurgency. With a power vacuum, the insurgents came from around the Islamic world to attempt to wrest control of Iraq from the United States. Oops; I guess we didn't plan for that.

A lot of the problems in Iraq come from this lack of infastructure. Roads, pipelines, and electrical lines were destroyed during the invasion, and they have yet to be rebuilt. Under Saddam Hussein, there was a bureaucracy in place that got everyday tasks done. Now, there's nothing. Power generation remains below pre-invasion levels. And the Texas tea that we thought would flow like manna from heaven ended up flowing like the trickle of a broken faucet. Pipelines are still destroyed and have not been rebuilt fast enough. The oil is there, but there's no way to get it out. The Bush Administration had hoped that oil sales would -- pardon the term -- fuel the country's growth, but those oil sales haven't happened, and neither has the growth.

Oh, and the world is a safer place now that Saddam Hussein is no longer in power.

Posted by Mark at 5:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Reuters reports, "After months of debate over science and religion, the Kansas Board of Education has tentatively approved new state science standards that weaken the role evolution plays in teaching about the origin of life." This does not mean that intelligent design is in the curriculum, but it does mean that the official position of the state of Kansas is skepticism regarding evolution, which could lead to intelligent design being brought into the curriculum.

Time has a great article this week about the evolution/intelligent design controversy. One of the most important points the article brings up is that scientists don't wish to debate intelligent design theorists not out of fear, but out of scientific integrity:

Many scientists have been reluctant to engage in a debate with advocates of intelligent design because to do so would legitimize the claim that there's a meaningful debate about evolution. "I'm concerned about implying that there is some sort of scientific argument going on. There's not," says noted British biologist Richard Dawkins, professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University, whose most recent book about evolution is The Ancestor's Tale. He and other scientists say advocates of intelligent design do not play by the rules of science. They do not publish papers in peer-reviewed journals, and their hypothesis cannot be tested by research and the study of evidence. Indeed, Behe concedes, "You can't prove intelligent design by an experiment." Dawkins compares the idea of teaching intelligent-design theory with teaching flat earthism-- perfectly fine in a history class but not in science. He says, "If you give the idea that there are two schools of thought within science--one that says the earth is round and one that says the earth is flat--you are misleading children."

President Bush's statement last week that he would like to see intelligent design taught so that all viewpoints can be expressed is playing right into the hands of ID supporters. There is no "all viewpoints" about evolution within the scientific community. Real, actual, no-foolin' scientists accept that evolution is true. There is no controversy in the legitimate scientific community about evolution. No scientist is suggesting that there is scientific evidence for ID; on the contrary, it is ID people -- who are not scientists, even if some of them have scientific credentials -- who suggest that there is "scientific" evidence for ID. But their evidence amounts to saying, "Your evidence can't possibly be right." There is no positive theory being put forth by ID people. Their theory is nothing more than a negation of evolution, and they are using rhetoric and reason, not empirical data, to support their claim. More importantly, they appeal to public ignorance about how evolution really works and disguise their true purpose, claiming that they just want to "teach the controversy." They invented the controversy! It's like claiming that the Earth is flat and then teaching both the round-earth and flat-earth theories in order to "examine all the viewpoints," even if the flat-earth viewpoint is held by only a small minority of people who have no credentials to make such a determination.

So, rather than put forth their creationism theory, ID supporters have taken to inventing something that weakens evolution in the minds of people, making them ready to accept creationism in the future. ID is not about science; it's about public relations. It's about using straw men to confuse the public and it's about ID supporters counting on the fact that most people don't really know how evolution works. ID people tell the public, "Evolution states that X happened. Doesn't that sound silly?" when in fact evolution does not state that X happened. The public is getting its information about evolution from the ID supporters, and that's not good.

Posted by Mark at 5:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Peter Jennings died today at the age of 67!

I was dumbfounded when I heard. Surely it must be a joke? But, sadly, it wasn't.

Peter Jennings will always remain special to my friends and me. Four years ago, we were college freshmen who couldn't take our eyes off the news in the days following September 11. We had been at school for scarcely two weeks when the disaster hit. We watched the news religiously. And through it all was Peter Jennings. The man looked like he had been awake for days. Indeed, says his obituary at ABC News, "He anchored more than 60 hours that week during the network's longest continuous period of news coverage." He must not have slept for 60 hours.

In recognition of his steadfast service to the United States, we created The Peter Jennings Fan Club in an effort to urge ABC to let the man get some sleep, for crying out loud.

Peter Jennings will be missed by all. He was one of the greatest news anchors ever.

Posted by Mark at 1:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Bush Administration really doesn't like investigations. It wants to make everyone else accountable to it, but it refers to be accountable to everyone else, including the people who elected it into office.

For example, right after the September 11 attacks, Congress wanted to form a committee to investigate the attacks. Bush stonewalled the creation of an investigatory committee until two years later. Then they wanted the president to meet with them -- alone and under oath -- as well as then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, also alone and under oath. Bush said, "No dice" in both circumstances. He agreed to allow Condie to speak to them, not under oath, and he deigned to speak to them, also -- not under oath and with VP Cheney. The September 11 commission concluded that the attacks were the result of multiple intelligence and communications failures, and also concluded that Iraq and al-Qaeda had no significant operating relationship, even if an Iraqi official met once with an al-Qaeda official in Czechoslovakia.

After Bob Novak published his column in The Chicago Sun-Times, the Justice Department opened an investigation. They seemed to think this was serious business. The Bush Administration told the public that they would look into it, but they haven't done their own investigation. Finally, now that a federal grand jury is looking into the matter, the Bush Administration has said that they will begin their own investigation.

Man, they really don't like it when people investigate them!

And yet the Republicans spent several years and a lot of taxpayer dollars trying to get Clinton on anything they could, even if they had to make up a crazy conspiracy theory like "Clinton killed Vince Foster." In the end, they tried to get him on charges of perjury, which he was found not guilty of, thank you very much.

And yes, I do think that endangering national security to "get back" at someone is a teensy bit worse than committing perjury. Clinton lied to a jury. Two folks in the Bush Administration jeoparadized national security. Which sounds worse to you?

If you'd like to look at the columns that started it all, I have reproduced the Wilson column, the Novak column that outs Valerie Plame, and the Novak column that outs her front company. If Bob Novak got flak to outing Valerie Plame, why did he go to the trouble of publishing the name of her front company three months later? CIA operatives tell everyone else they work for some other company; in the case of Valerie Plame, it was a fictional company called Brewster-Jennings. Not only did Novak destroy Plame's cover, but he destroyed the cover of any other CIA operative that claimed to work for "Brewster-Jennings," as well as anyone who had previously worked for "Brewster-Jennings" or anyone who had ever done business with someone from a company called Brewster-Jennings.

It's not just Valerie Plame whose cover was blown; Brewster-Jennings' cover was blown, and so was anyone who dealt with either the company or her. It has also hurt our ability to recruit informants from overseas since the potential informants know that our government is more than willing to rat out our agents for political gain.

The world is a safer place.

Posted by Mark at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

We learned some new things today in the NovakRoveCooperMillerPlameWilsonGate affair. And why has it become fashionable to add "-gate" to the name of every scandal?

In this week's issue of Time magazine, Cooper says that Rove was the first person to tell him that Joseph Wilson's wife was a CIA operative. Rove did not mention Valerie Plame by name, but said that Wilson's wife worked for "the agency," which, of course, means only one thing in Washington, D.C. Rove testified that Cooper called him regarding a story he was writing about Ambassador Wilson, and Rove was merely trying to set Cooper's facts straight. "Rove went on to say that Wilson had not been sent to Niger by the director of the CIA and, I believe from my subsequent e-mails -- although it's not in my notes -- that Rove added that Dick Cheney didn't send him either. Indeed, the next day the Vice President's chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, told me Cheney had not been responsible for Wilson's mission," said Cooper this week in Time. Apparently, Cooper was ready to write that Wilson had been sent on his mission to Africa by the Vice President's office, something that Rove said wasn't true. Rove told Cooper that Wilson's wife -- who worked for "the agency" -- was responsible for getting him that job. This was akin to naming Plame outright, for everyone knew who Wilson's wife was, just not that she worked for the CIA.

Cooper concludes:

So did Rove leak Plame's name to me, or tell me she was covert? No. Was it through my conversation with Rove that I learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and may have been responsible for sending him? Yes. Did Rove say that she worked at the "agency" on "WMD"? Yes. When he said things would be declassified soon, was that itself impermissible? I don't know. Is any of this a crime? Beats me.

Rove himself has testified in front of the grand jury, saying that he actually learned of Plame's identity from Bob Novak. Now the question is: if Rove didn't tell Novak about Plame, then who did? Judith Miller remains mum on the subject.

Also, this weekend, George W. Bush changed his tune about the leaker. In September of 2003, Bush said that whoever was involved with the leak would "be taken care of." Now, he has changed his standard of firing to say, "If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration." We have gone from the standard of merely being involved to the standard of committing a crime. This, of course, because now we know that if Rove didn't commit a crime, at the very least he was involved in the leak.

Posted by Mark at 9:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the wake of its many no-bid contracts in Iraq, as well as poor service and overcharging for meals by its subsidiary, Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), you'd think Halliburton wouldn't be getting any more contracts.

Of course, you'd be wrong. On June 18, almost no major papers reported that KBR won a contract to build a $30 million prison facility in Guantanamo Bay. This was reported by only five major papers and magazines, according to LexisNexis.

Here's a list of the other successful projects undertaken by KBR, as revealed in hearings held on June 27:

Pentagon auditors have questioned more than $1 billion in costs by contracting giant Halliburton Co. for its work in Iraq, a number several times higher than previously disclosed, according to a report by congressional Democrats.

The report, based on Defense Contract Audit Agency documents and a briefing by DCAA officials, details $813 million in questioned costs on a Halliburton contract to provide logistical support to U.S. troops and $219 million on a no-bid contract to restore Iraqi's oil network.

The Defense Contract Audit Agency found an additional $442 million in Halliburton charges that were "unsupported," meaning the company had not provided enough documentation to justify the cost, the report said.

Among the costs that Pentagon auditors questioned were $152,000 in "movie library costs," a $1.5 million tailoring bill that auditors deemed higher than reasonable, more than $560,000 worth of heavy equipment that was considered unnecessary, and two multimillion-dollar transportation bills that appeared to overlap. [The Washington Post.]

Oh, and then there's this:

Speaking by video, Rory Mayberry, a former food production manager at Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root Inc., told Democratic lawmakers how Halliburton charged the government for as many as 10,000 meals a day it never served. He also said the company paid unusually high prices for its food, fed food as much as a year beyond its expiration date to the troops and ordered employees not to talk to U.S. government auditors.

"For trucks that were hit by convoy fire and bombings, we were told to go into the trucks and remove the food items and use them after removing the bullets and any shrapnel," he said. [The Washington Post; hyperlink not in original.]

What happened when government auditors came calling, to see how KBR was doing?

The managers themselves would leave the base or hide from the auditors when they were on the base and not answer the radios when we called for them. We were told to follow instructions or get off the base. The threat of being sent to a camp under fire was their way of keeping us quiet. The employees that talked to the auditors were moved to the other bases that were under more fire then Anaconda. If they refused to move, they were fired and sent home.

Frequently, there wasn't enough fresh food to go around, since KBR managers were using fresh food to have barbecues for themselves, which they had about three times a week.

KBR also received information on safe food-handling guidelines from the military. KBR managers told their employees explicitly to ignore these guidelines.

Thank you, KBR, for supporting our troops.

Posted by Mark at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Security expert Bruce Schneier must be screaming from wherever he is at the U.S. reaction to this morning's bombings in London. The immediate reaction was a tightening down of mass transit in the United States and an increase in the terror alert level. The New York Times reports:

Thousands of police officers in New York were dispatched to guard bridges, rail and bus stations - many of them staying on for hours after their shifts - where they were patrolling on foot and monitoring tunnels with video surveillance equipment.

Governor Pataki has signed an executive order authorizing state police officers from New Jersey and Connecticut to provide security on trains coming into New York. The increased police presence will remain in the city through the Friday rush, Commissioner Kelly said.

Counterterrorism officers are inspecting subway trains and "suspicious" luggage with bomb-sniffing dogs, Mayor Bloomberg said. Police helicopters are monitoring harbors, sea marshal patrols have been stepped up, and more officers are being posted aboard ferries and at the St. George and Whitehall Ferry terminals, he said.

Is this really the correct reaction? Bruce Schneier says no. In an interview with IT Conversations last year, Schneier talked about how the United States is really good at preventing against what terrorists have already done:

One of the things I'm always struck with is how good we are at defending against what the terrorists did last year. We're spending a lot of money shoring up our airlines and now we're talking about shoring up our trains, and money that we spend that simply causes the bad guys to change their tactics is money wasted. You have a red and a blue door, and the terrorists go through the red door, and you say, "We must secure the red door," so they go through the blue door next time. So what did you actually buy? And one of my fears is that you spend a lot of money securing the airlines and the terrorists move on to shopping malls or movie theaters or crowded restaurants. There are just so many targets that taking the target that terrorists happened to pick last year and securing it just sort of ignores the real problem.

This is exactly what we're doing in the United States: trying to protect against what the terrorists have already done. If they're smart, they will change their tactics for their next attack. Like the Borg, they constantly adapt. The only way they'll use the same method multiple times is if they are attacking several places simultaneously, as they did today.

Of course, in the same interview, Schneier says that we should do whatever makes people feel safe even if it won't actually make them safer. Sometimes, though, this is not feasible. A host on MSNBC asked former NYPD chief Bernard Kerrick if it would be feasible to institute airline-style security on the New York City subway system. Kerrick replied that it wouldn't be feasible, since there are 100,000 people in Grand Central Station during the morning rush hour, and attempting to institute metal detectors and wanding would create more than a bottleneck and defeat the purpose of having a subway system at all.

What is the answer then? As Schneier says, attempting to secure the targets is like treating a disease's symptoms and not its cause. It's a long-term fix, but ultimately, to reduce terrorism and make the populace safer, we must institute policies that address the reasons why people commit terrorist acts in the first place. There are far too many places where people congregate in large groups for us to be able to secure all of them.

Posted by Mark at 9:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

George Mikan died today at the age of 80. You may not know who George Mikan is, but if you watch basketball, then you're familiar with the thing he personally invented as NBA Commissioner in 1967: the three-point line. But there's something else he was indirectly responsible for: the shot clock. The following comes from David Feldman, Imponderables: The Solution to the Mysteries of Everyday Life (New York: Quill, 1987), 29-31:

During the 1953-1954 season, the National Basketball League was beset by difficulties. Attendance was low; many franchises were in financial trouble.

Professional basketball's problem was not a trivial one: Fans found the game boring. Hoop fans like to see plenty of shooting and scoring, but the rules did absolutely nothing to encourage teams with a lead to shoot the ball. If a team led in the late stages of the game, the custom was to have its best ball handler dribble in the backcourt, forcing opponents to foul intentionally, resulting in tedious but profitable free throws for the stalling team. There was also no incentive for teams in the lead to run cross court and set up their offense quickly, further dragging the pace of the game.

The owners knew they had a problem, but the solution was the branchild of an unlikely savior named Danny Biasone. Biasone, a bowling alley proprietor, bought the Syracuse Nationals franchise for the princely sum of $1000. Biasone might not have held the clout within the league to comete with the Knicks or Celtics owners, but he concluded that a clock was necessary to force players to shoot at regular intervals and speed up the game.

How did Biasone arrive at 24 seconds? He figured that the average game contains about 120 shots between the two teams. Since there are 48 minutes, or 2880 seconds, in an NBA game, teams averaged exactly one shot every 24 seconds. Figuring that players would be be forced to shoot before the 24 seconds expired, a shot clock would compel teams to shoot more often and, presumably, score more often.

Biasone invited club owners to watch a demonstration of how a game would be played with a clock. All could see that the shot clock would add excitement to the game, and it was instituted in regular play at the beginning of the 1954-1955 season.

The shot clock changed basketball immediately. Scoring did increase, an average of 14 points per game in one season. Most importantly, attendance rose quickly. NBA historian Charles Paikert quoted former league president Maurice Podoloff as saying that the adoption of the clock "was the most important event in the NBA and Danny Biasone was the most important man in the NBA."

Biasone's shot clock had another effect that perhaps he did not forsee -- it changed the type of player needed to build a championship team. The Minneapolis Lakers dominated the NBA before the shot clock, led by the physically bruising but slow and lumbering George Mikan. The Lakers, with the shot clock, could no longer afford to loiter downcourt while Mikan hauled down a rebound and casually jogged down the halfcourt line. Mikan retired the year the shot clock was instituted. He returned for the 1955-1956 season, but averaged only 10 points [per game] versus a career average of 22 points, and he quit after half a season.

The shot clock was tailor-made for the team Red Auerbach was fashioning in Boston. In Bill Russell, the Celtics found a tall center who was exceptionally quick and could spark a fast break offense.

Players like Mikan could not survive in the new NBA; the AP reports that he "retir[ed] because of injuries in 1956," but Feldman provides convincing evidence that the gigantic (6'10", 250-pound) Mikan was the perfect player for the old kind of basketball, and that his retirement coincided with the introduction of the shot clock is probably no coincidence. Nonetheless, as contemporary basketball players like Shaquille O'Neal point out, he was the original basketball superstar. And, in some degree thanks to him, we now have a shot clock that makes basketball the faced-past, 100-point-scoring game that it is today.

Just in case you're curious, in the 1984-1985 season -- thirty years later -- the average number of shots increased from 120 shots in 1955 to 178 shots.

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Writing in a syndicated column today, conservative Cal Thomas says that embryonic stem cell research is wrong in all cases. He backs up his argument with religious reasons, observing, "Who are we -- evolutionary accidents upon whom any and all experiments should be tolerated for the 'greater good,' or are we something else and someone else's? Who made us -- a scientist in a laboratory dish, a cosmic accident, or 'our Creator'?"

Stem cell research has the ability, sometime in the future, to find cures for diseases we have now. The diseases which stem cell research would repair have to do with organic, cell-based problems, in which cells which should be healthy are missing or damaged. While all body cells are specialized, stem cells -- cells which exist in the embryo stage, as well as in umbilical cords -- have the ability to adapt and become like the cells around them. An injection of stem cells into a brain would cause the cells to become neurons. This particular feat would be tremendous, since everything we know about the brain so far suggests that neurons cannot regenerate or replicate. A stroke victim permanently loses all of the neurons that die in a stroke. An injection of stem cells could cause those stem cells to become neurons, effectively replacing the neurons that died and restoring normal brain function.

Critics of embryonic stem cell research say, "There's always hope with adult stem cells and umbilical cord stem cells." They also say that the federal research ban is only on federally-funded research and not private research. But there is not as much hope with adult stem cells and umbilical stem cells. These stem cells are different and are not as versatile as embryonic stem cells. As for federal money, that's how most research gets done. Private companies, it is true, do a lot of their own research, but a goodly amount of biomedical research happens at universities or other institutions, and these places get their funding from the National Institutes of Health and other federal sources. The fact is that most of the medical research going on in this country is funded by the government, and the government saying that it will not fund a particular kind of research effectively puts an end to that research, since there's no money to support it.

But what about other countries? Europe is far more advanced in their stem cell technology, an if we want to bring this argument down to the pragmatic level, then picture thousands of the United States' brightest biomedical students studying in Europe because that's where there's funding for stem cell research. Now imagine that these people live there, work there, and pay taxes on their six-figure incomes there. Not only have we lost brilliant minds, we've also lost tax revenue.

The logical leap from "embryonic stem cell research is murder" to "embryonic stem cell research should be outlawed" is "embryos are a form of life that should be preserved at all costs." But what are embryos? Fetuses they are not. Embryos are not fully-formed, tiny versions of cute babies. Embryos -- which exist in the period of human gestation from one to three months -- are not cute. They're smaller than the period at the end of this sentence, and they're a mass of cells. (Could you spot the embryo? Was it cute?) They have no discernable organ systems, they do not feel pain, they cover the most basic definition of "life." An embryo is only slightly higher on the food chain than a bacterium, and we kill the latter every day with Lysol. The "breath of life" that God infuses into a zygote when it is formed can be replicated in a laboratory; we have already created human life in a laboratory, and those "test-tube babies" are no less human than you or me (unless you're a test tube baby, in which case, you're less human than me). There is nothing special about the creation of human life. There are embryos living in freezers at fertility clinics around the country. Let's ask them how they're doing, and how they feel about being frozen. Let's also ask them how they feel about taking up space and doing nothing useful when they could be used for stem cell research.

Can destroying embryos really be called "killing," as Cal Thomas calls it? In the sense that we can kill a bacterium, a housefly, or the yeast in my beer, then yes, we can. We can kill all of those things, and we should be ashamed of it.

Can we destroy an embryo and call it "killing" in the same sense that we can kill something sentient (or possibly sentient), like a fully-formed baby, a dog, or a dolphin, then no, it is not killing. While it may be debated whether or not a dolphin has a concept and awareness of itself (sentience), we can be sure that a human embryo will never contemplate its own existence. A baby is even aware of what is going on around it -- and more importantly, it is recognizable as human. Put a late-stage human embryo, chicken embryo, and monkey embryo side-by-side-by-side and I dare you to correctly identify the human embryo. I bet it will be really hard, since they are practically indiscernable from one another.

Certainly life has a value, but not inherently. Only when we can assign value to life is it life. Hence the death of Terri Schiavo. Sure, she was alive, but was she living? We have no idea how aware she was of anything as she lay in that bed for ten years. Sure, she was breathing, but what kind of life was that? What if, somewhere inside of her head, she was screaming to be killed because she was trapped inside a useless shell of a body? In the business, we would call that torture.

What if we stopped killing bugs because they might be alive? We have as much evidence to suggest that bugs are sentient as we do to suggest that embryos are sentient. Let's not talk about the "soul" because that isn't empirical. Find me hard data that human embryos have souls, and I'll write every congressman I know to stop embryonic stem cell research. Until then, the possibility that embryonic stem cells can be used to cure illnesses is far outweighed by the much more remote possibility that they are somehow more valuable than the stuff in my yogurt. If people want to keep their own embryos safe from harm, then that's fine for them. But don't prevent people who want to use embryos for research from doing so.

(If possible, I'd like Elizabeth to weigh in on this, since she has far more experience in both zoology and working in a laboratory than I will ever have.)

Posted by Mark at 9:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Today is the ten-year anniversary of the terrorist attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Discussion of this anniversary has been relatively quiet; I didn't know until yesterday that it was happening. What is the reasoning behind this? In two years, we will celebrate the five-year anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. In a country where anniversaries of events that are multiples of five are big deals, Oklahoma City's anniversary is without a lot of fanfare.

For thirty years prior to Oklahoma City, Americans could safely say that terrorists were Muslims. It was Muslims who killed nine Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972. It was Muslims who took 66 Americans hostage in 1979. It was Muslims who blew up a Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. It was the Muslims who blew up Pan-Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, scotland in 1988. Imagine the nation's surprise when we discovered that it was a Christian -- Timothy McVeigh -- who was responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing.

An ABC News piece about the 10th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing says:

But McVeigh, though influenced by the anti-government and racist ideology of militia and white supremacist groups, was a member of none of them. Like Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph, he was essentially a lone wolf who acted on his own.

"That's where the danger is," said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino. "If there's anything Oklahoma City demonstrated, it's that a committed domestic terrorist doesn't need to be a part of an organized group to have a devastating effect."

This isn't true. Evidence shows that McVeigh was a member of some white supremacist groups. He was a believer in Christian Identity, a conservative Christian movement which holds that white North Americans are the racial descendants of the ancient tribes of Israel and Jews are the descendants of Satan. They hate non-whites, communists, and homosexuals, as well. Christian Identity believers are what is called "post-millennial" in their eschatology. They believe that the world must be cleansed before the Second Coming of Christ ("post" meaning that Christ will return after a godly dominion on Earth is established), and they are logically the ones to do it. Violence caused by human beings will be necessary in order to create the conditions under which Christ will return. Christian Identity believers are also believers in Reconstruction theology, which says that the ideal system of government is a Christian theology rooted in the Bible, and our civil laws should change to match what the Bible (the infalliable word/law of God) says about what is right and what is wrong.

It's far too easy to shrug Timothy McVeigh or Eric Rudolph off as independent "crazies." They are definitely part of a larger theological movement which uses violence as a means to either (1) get its politics across, or (2) bring about Judgment Day. Both of these uses of violence are grounded in religion, since they are using Christian values to determine what should be blown up and what shouldn't be, and their politics are Christian (i.e., the Christians should be in charge). Eric Rudolph hates abortionists and homosexuals and feels that the government, in its implicit endorsement of homosexuality and abortion (ostensibly because it doesn't outright outlaw both practices), is no longer legitimate, and he must take the law into his own hands. These are not individual "crazy" viewpoints. There are thousands of people around the country who believe what Rudolph believes.

It is quite easy for Christians to believe that Islam is a religion of violence, since it isn't their religion. It's much harder for them to accept that there are people out there committing violent acts in the name of Christianity, and harder still to believe that there are entire communities of support ("interpretive communities," says Mark Juergensmeyer) out there who believe the same thing. If Timothy McVeigh were "a lone wolf," then we could chalk his violence up to being a wacko who radically misinterprets Christianity, while in the meantime, Islam is a religion of violence. But to suggest that Christianity could lend itself to violence is a heretical statement indeed, but the fact is that both religions have been used -- and continue to be used -- to justify terrorist acts. Christians are terrorists, too, and they commit terrorist acts in the name of a Christianity that they believe is the true Christianity (while others who talk about "non-violence" are in fact non-believers who have been co-opted by a tyrannical secular government; if they were "real Christians," then they would be fighting alongside the Christian Identity people and the Reconstructionists).

This is a statement from someone who adamantly believes that true Christians cannot be violent, while true Muslims can certainly be violent:

I am, as most informed people are, aware of the political climate of today. I am aware of the hatred for Osama bin Laden [I myself hate him] and other terrorists. I am aware that after the vicious, violent acts of terrorism, carried out by terrorists, on September 11th, irrational people associated terrorism with Islam, with Muslims, with anyone of that skin color. But, these people do not speak for the entire American public. This class, just because of the political climate, should not try to manipulate the study of a particular religion in a certain light, whether that be a more violent depiction Christianity, or less violent depiction Islam. To do so would be a perversion of the truth, unfaithful to the academic pledge of honesty and integrity, and would be an unethical teaching practice void of all reason but sympathy for the very people we as a country are in a fight for our lives against.

But the simple fact is that people commit violent acts in the name of religion all the time. Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Hindus do it. Our attitude that terrorism comes from without, not within, is a naive one. Christians commit terrorist acts all the time. But, because we are a Christian country, we don't attribute that violence to a trend, but rather to a specific, abnormal instance. It is a trend -- a chronic problem rather than an acute one -- and on this tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, we would do well to remember that terrorists are regular, everyday people, and terrorism can come from anywhere, from any person of any religion or ideological persuasion.

Posted by Mark at 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Advocate reports that Ohio's new marriage amendment prevents people who are not married from filing domestic abuse charges. (Via Metafilter.)

Ohio's constitutional amendment doesn't just outlaw gay marriage, but also common-law marriage and rights for live-in partners. Here is the text of the amendment:

Only a union between one man and one woman may be a marriage valid in or recognized by this state and its political subdivisions. This state and its political subdivisions shall not create or recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance or effect of marriage.

The Advocate reports on a case from Cleveland where the lawyer of a man accused of domestic violence against his live-in girlfriend "had asked the judge to throw out the charge because of the new wording in Ohio's constitution that prohibits any state or local government from enforcing a law that would 'create or recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals.'"

Before the amendment was ratified, "courts applied the domestic violence law by defining a family as including an unmarried couple living together as would a husband and wife."

Hear that, straighties? Your precious Issue One -- the one that was designed to prevent you from being ass-raped every minute of every day as you walked to the corner store for some milk and a carton of eggs (because that's what the gays do) -- has backfired on you! Turns out Robert Blackwell hates rednecks as much as he hates gays! The joke's on you for buying into the right's "you should vote for us because we'll keep the heathens away, even though we're screwing you financially" argument!

Ohio is still reprehensible.

Posted by Mark at 9:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In an attempt to appeal to the new party line and make their Christian constituents happy, Congress voted last week to send Terri Schiavo's case to a US federal court with a federal judge randomly selected by computer to hear the case. But that's not at issue. The Constitution gives Congress the power to determine the cases that federal courts will hear. Congress has total control over the federal courts, since it established them back in 1789 by an Act of Congress.

What is in question here is whether or not it is Tom DeLay's, George Bush's, or anyone else's business what happens to Terri Schiavo. Schiavo has lain in a "persistent vegetative state" -- not quite a coma -- for the last seven years after her heart stopped due to an undiagnosed potassium deficiency. Six courts have heard her story, not to mention that the Supreme Court has turned down requests for writs of certiorari three times. Every time the ruling has been the same: Terri Schiavo has a right to die.

The New Right disagrees. It is to be contrasted from the Old Right -- the party of the beloved Ronald Reagan -- due to its religiousness. Ronald Reagan was like George Washington in his affirmation that there was a god out there, somewhere, but he was not public about his religiousness. His conservatism was good, old-fashioned political and economic conservatism. Tax cuts for the wealthy. Budget cuts for social programs. Increased defense spending.

George W. Bush, the figurehead of the New Right, does all that as well as publicly proclaiming his religiousness to anyone who cares (or doesn't care) to hear it. Bush is a born-again Christian, an Evangelical who believes in Puritan morals: drugs are bad, sex is bad, everything the state says is bad is bad. He's like a modern-day John Calvin, except not so crazy and not as smart.

The New Right combines all the secular divisiveness of the Old Right with a new divisiveness based on religion. The official government line on sex education is abstienence only. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was even changed to reflect this new policy, trumpeting the virtues of abstinence without so much as a word about prophylactics (all this in the face of research which suggests that abstinence-only education is, at best, merely as effective as birth-control education, and at worst, much less effective).

What a perfect issue upon which to proclaim one's values: the right to die, an extension of the "right to life." The New Right posits that while there is a right to life, there is no right to die. Just ask former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who, months into his new job in 2001, ordered the state of Oregon to repeal a popularly-passed state law allowing assisted suicide. Thankfully, the US Supreme Court rebuked him for overstepping his bounds. But where are the rebukes for Bush and the Republicans in Congress who want to involve themselves in the private lives of citizens?

For the Old Right, the Schiavo case has been appalling. Nine old-school Republican senators voted against the measure to send her case to a federal court. Their justification was that the government -- and least of all the Republican Party, the party of federalism -- should not get involved in the issue. The New Right (of which Ohio Senator George Voinovich is a member) claims that issues of life always trump issues of federalism. If there is the possibility of someone's life being taken -- even at that person's will -- then Congress will send in the Marines to ensure that no one dies (even if they want to). "My party is demonstrating that they are for states' rights unless they don't like what states are doing," said Christopher Shays (R-CT) in today's New York Times. "The Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy."

Members of Congress who voted against the measure were weary of government involvement in the case and the kind of precedent that such involvement would set. Anytime someone disagreed with the outcome of a case, he could march to Congress and demand a new trial? Or, more frighteningly, Congress has the power to tell people what they can and cannot do with their lives?

For all the talk that Republicans make about Democrats using the judiciary to usurp the legislature, here is an example of Republicans using the judiciary to usurp the judiciary. Don't like the outcome of a case? Then send it back again! Order a new trial. Keep going until you find a judge who agrees with you. That's clearly what the Constitution, with its literality and timelessness, means.

Terri Schiavo's parents maintain that with additional therapy, she will get better. Doctors who have examined Schiavo disagree, which is why courts have repeatedly ruled in favor of Michael Schiavo, her former husband, who wants her feeding tube removed. Mr. Schiavo has testified several times that Terri told him that she didn't want to remain a vegetable on life support.

So who holds responsibility for our decisions? Is it us, or is it the government? Apparently, in matters spiritual (and this is being framed spiritually), the government has the last word. In our new Christian theocracy, the government makes our moral decisions for us -- and almost every decision is framed as a moral decision.

Terri Schiavo is not going to get better, despite the claims of her parents and doctors who have never met her or examined her. Certainly she has a right to life, but she also has a right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Trapped inside a stationary shell, she has no liberty, to say nothing of any happiness she may have left. As the recent Spanish film El mar adentro points out, sure people have a right to life, but if they're a vegetable or a cripple, then what kind of life is it? Must they have any life, or a good life of their choosing? If life is a gift, then what happens when a person doesn't want that gift anymore? What happens when life causes more pain and suffering than joy and happiness? Must a person still stick it out just for the sake of existing?

Big philosophical questions that the New Right answers "yes" to. "Yes" a person must stick it out for the sake of existing. "No" it doesn't matter what the individual thinks. We, the congressmen, the Elect, will determine what you shall and shall not do with your own selves. You are not to be trusted with your own lives. They are far too precious to be abused by you.

The age of American secularism is coming to a close. For the next three years, we will be ruled as though this were seventeenth-century Geneva, or 1980s Iran. Faster than we care to believe, The Handmaid's Tale is becoming a reality. The government is taking control of our souls, acting as their custodian, since we un-Elect are too sinful to be trusted with the breath of God. Trust us, we know what we're doing. The fact that we are in power at all is a reflection of our deep spirituality. We're clearly better people than you are. Why else is it that we're up here and you're down there?

Posted by Mark at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Elizabeth and I wanted to watch a movie last night, so I suggested Donnie Darko. Moments before putting the DVD in, however, I spied Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on Matt's bookshelf. Elizabeth had never seen it, so I asked her if she wanted to watch Fear and Loathing instead. So we did.

The movie finished and Matt showed us an old BBC documentary about Hunter S. Thompson just to reinforce how much like Thompson Johnny Depp's acting was. We were all thoroughly impressed.

Suddenly, I received an IM from Scott telling me that Hunter S. Thompson had died. That had to have been one of the freakiest moments of my life. Scott had no idea that we were watching Fear and Loathing. We picked the movie on a whim. And I wondered if Hunter S. Thompson had shot himself while we were watching his movie. It's a rather morbid thought, but at the same time, it's a question that you would like to have answered. As we were watching Johnny Depp portray Raul Duke in a film version of Thompson's book, Thompson was exiting this world. He'll never know if Elizabeth liked it or not.

Posted by Mark at 3:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Doug Ross, a normal citizen like you and me, wrote a guest column for The Cincinnati Enquirer's "Your Voice" section on Friday. You know it's going to be good. (Link may expire after a week.) Aw, heck. Let me just post the entirety of his op-ed here:

Elections in Iraq spread freedom

In medicine, the consequences of failing to clean and dress a festering wound are clear: severe infection and even death may result. Prior to the war in the Middle East, Iraq was just such a festering wound.

It is safe to assume that certain observers among us, including recent writers in this space, believe that the world would be better off with Saddam Hussein, the terrorist training center at Salman Pak, Abu Abbas, Abu Nidal, al Qaida affiliate Ansar al Islam, a nuclear research program, Uday's rape rooms, hundreds of thousands of bodies in unmarked mass graves, anthrax, and tons of high explosives all co-existing in Iraq as the highly suspect UN sanctions machine ground to a halt.

It is increasingly clear that these observers are possessed of antediluvian ideas and low reserves of intellectual honesty. A little historical perspective is in order.

In 1776, there was exactly one country in the world with an elected government: the United States of America. Today there are 117 - or more than 60 percent of the world's governments.

Writer Joshua Muravchik points to "waves of democracy": periods of time in which the creation of elected governments accelerates, slows and then starts anew. Further, this tidal effect strengthens itself. As more democracies arise, remaining authoritarian governments find it increasingly difficult to retain power.

Only one region of the world has, thus far, been left behind: the Middle East and North Africa. Israel is the sole democracy among 18 states. The handiwork of George W. Bush is therefore astonishing: Afghanistan, the Palestinian Authority, and - within days - Iraq will all have held elections.

Further, Bush's leadership has heartened freedom-lovers and propelled the cause of liberty in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Oman, where elections have been or are slated to be held. And the enticing fragrance of freedom hasn't stopped at the ballot box.

Egypt's first independent newspaper launched in 2004. A new network called Democracy Television, owned by Arab liberals, is slated to begin broadcasting in May. Each month, influential Arab intellectuals issue new demands for reform.

Some caustic observers warn that democracy is no panacea for terrorism. But the historical record shows that democratic governments seldom sow either conflict or terror. These observers, therefore, must ignore both history and intellectual honesty, burying their heads in the sand while freedom marches on.

Doug Ross of Symmes Township is a software architect and developer specializing in Internet-based commerce and collaboration systems.

Mr. Ross deigns to give us a history lesson in order to explain why "it is safe to assume that certain observers among us, including recent writers in this space, believe that the world would be better off with Saddam Hussein." Okay, Doug. Teach away.

"In 1776, there was exactly one country in the world with an elected government: the United States of America." Really, Doug? By my calculations, there were no elected governments in 1776, since the United States did not exist until 1789! Once again, we have confused the Declaration of Independence -- a persuasive essay -- for the Constitution -- a legal document. But I suppose that's a public school education for you.

He then gives us a lesson in contemporary geo-politics. "Israel is the sole democracy among 18 states [in the Middle East]. The handiwork of George W. Bush is therefore astonishing: Afghanistan, the Palestinian Authority, and -- within days -- Iraq will have held elections." Not so fast there, Sunny Jim. What did George W. Bush have to do with elections in the Palestinian Authority? And let's talk about these elections in Iraq. Why is it so important to the Bush administration that the elections happen, even though there has been a guarantee of violence? Terrorists have published pamphlets declaring, "We vow to wash the streets of Baghdad with the voters' blood" and "To those of you who think you can vote and then run away, we will shadow you and catch you, and we will cut off your heads and the heads of your children." That's quite an incentive to vote. Mark my words: tomorrow's election will be a bloodbath.

Let's go back to that statement that Israel is the sole democracy in the Middle East. What happened to Turkey? Last I checked, Turkey was a secular democracy and it was one of our good friends. Was Gamal Abdal Nasser's overthrow of King Farouk all for naught? I suppose Egypt doesn't count as a democracy, either. Probably because it's not on our side (Egypt sided with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, though t