Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
Who is Lurch?

JEOPARDY!
The Butler Did It for $600

He must have had a great benefit plan; Alfred began his service to this crime fighter in 1943.

Updated After Sunday's mass protest and Monday's smaller marches on economic issues, demonstrations against the war and other federal policies continued on Tuesday, a day that had earlier been set aside for staging creative nonviolent actions.

On the third day of protests, a day targeted months ago for intense anti-Bush civil disobedience, Manhattan began to resemble a crazy-quilt of barriers, heavily armed police and street-corner activists.

Among them were 500 marchers from the War Resisters League taking part in a "death march" from the site of the World Trade Center towers to Madison Square Garden. About 75 were arrested when the police wrapped the entire block they were on in netting - and then arrested them for blocking the sidewalk! You just have to laugh.

Also Tuesday, outside the Fox News Channel studios in midtown Manhattan, police in riot gear contained around 1,000 demonstrators behind barricades.

In what was dubbed a "shut-up-athon," protesters denounced what they called the network's right-wing slant. One woman held up a sign that read: "Republicans are really stupid. They watch Fox News and believe it." The demonstrators spilled onto nearby Sixth Avenue.

The day also featured two dozen employees of "Hallibacon" wearing pig snouts and wallowing in stacks of fake $100 bills while chanting ""We love money. We love war. We love Cheney even more."

I wonder if, since these actions were more narrowly focused on particular concerns than the mass march on Sunday, if they're more acceptable to those who found the sight of 400,000+ people in the streets a cause for snarky, condescending remarks rather than celebration.

If you wonder why I say that, you're happily unaware of the pompous offerings in some part of the lefty blogworld that Sunday's demo was - in fact, demonstrations in general are - an inefficient, pointless waste of time, just a means of "self-expression" unrelated to effective political action. They bewailed the "chaotic" nature of the protest, noting the wide variety of issues pressed by various marchers, comparing that unfavorably to the "civil rights/Vietnam era."

Since the main purveyors of this view are bloggers clearly too young to have experienced any of those demonstrations, the temptation is to dismiss them as simply ignorant of movement history - since anyone who was at any mass Vietnam-era action could have told them that those marches swung every bit as broad a brush as Sunday's did, if not more so. (And in fact, since the theme of Sunday was "the world says no to the Bush agenda," you would have expected a wide range of issues and styles.)

But the notion that demonstrations are ineffective, just a way to show off and act out, displays such an enormous ignorance of the dynamics of political action that it can't be ignored completely.

Political movements are not built by a single tactic, a single style, a single method, but by a blending of different approaches, from letter-writing to petitioning to voting to lobbying to donating money to the lengthy list goes on. It includes the plan of labor groups to put a million people on the streets doing door-to-door canvassing on September 2. It includes people doing voter-registration drives. And it most definitely includes public, including mass, demonstrations.

The resistance to marches seems to stem from a perception of them as somehow, I don't know, perhaps "icky" is a good word. That and a fear that if the "message" can't be strictly and tightly controlled - :gasp: people might have their own ideas about creative dress or message - it will lead to some sort of "disruptive" behavior that the GOP will be able to use to its benefit. (Oddly, a comparison is often drawn between now and Chicago 1968 - but while the "chaos" there, later described as a "police riot" by an investigating commission, was against the incumbent administration, the beneficiary to the extent there was one was the opposition, the opposite of the claimed risk now.)

Those must be the truer reasons, for certainly there was no real logic in the arguments actually given for the ineffectiveness of demonstrations. "If all those people had spent that day," said one, "convincing one neighbor to support Kerry, that would have been effective organizing." In addition to the notorious fallacy that Kerry is not only a real alternative to Bushism - a doubtful enough proposition - but the only real alternative, the argument lives in an "if only" fantasy. "If they'd only convinced a neighbor...." Yeah, and if your grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon. And my gosh, if only each Kerry supporter could convince just one Bush supporter to change their mind, Kerry would get 98% of the vote!

Recently, on a mailing list I'm on, I had an exchange with someone who was discouraging people from going to NYC, arguing it was "too risky" and that electoral politics are the way things get changed since "marchers don't make policy." I'm going to include here my side of the exchange, which I think offers one effective reply to those who regard wonkism and electioneering as the sole drivers of change. There is some repetition; I hope you will forgive me for not taking the time to combine those and what's above in this post into one argument.

August 16

We need people to run for office because that is how change comes about. I want to remind you that it was Kennedy's death that brought about the legislation for civil rights. Johnson rammed it through when he had the opportunity.

I say you have it exactly backwards. Electoral campaigns do not create movements. They can be based on them, they can help to build them further - provided that movement is already well established.

Public sympathy following Kennedy's death was a tool LBJ used to get civil rights legislation through Congress, but it did not "bring it about." Decades of work, of organizing, demonstrating, sitting-in, civil disobedience - that's what produced civil rights legislation.

You speak of Vietnam. Do you think Gene McCarthy caused the antiwar movement? That he caused antiwar sentiment? He was a product of that movement, not a progenitor of it.

And yes, the marches had something to do with ending the war. They weren't the only thing by any means; the death toll and the continuing failed promises of "the light at the end of the tunnel" were powerful forces in their own right. But the marches kept the issue alive and on top of the agenda in a way that would not have been possible otherwise, they reminded people who opposed the war that they were not alone, they legitimized the opposition of fence-sitters, they made it easier for politicians who might otherwise be silent to speak out, and they on a regular basis reminded those in power of the significant levels of resistance to their policies, levels both in numbers and, just as importantly, in intensity.

Dismissing marches as "glamorous" but useless and risky "fun" is both contradictory and unfair. Yes, I have marched, picketed, rallied, and done CD. I have been an organizer, a tax resister, and a draft resister. All the "activist" stuff.

But I have also signed more petitions, written more letters-to-the-editor, and contacted Congress more times than I care to remember. I have run for office - three times. And I have voted in every national, state, and local election for where I was at the time since 1972 (with the exception of one time when I moved into an area too late to register for the upcoming election).

That's not intended as puffery; there are many who did and do far more than me. It's to make the point that I will embrace all nonviolent means to advance justice and peace. You, it seems to me, are willing to dump most of them and put all your faith in a handful, ones that are at their best far weaker when standing alone. And I think that is a serious mistake.

August 17

You continue to insist that elections are the - not a, but the - means of change, while at the same time you use as an example the 1964 civil rights laws, which you say may still not have been law had it not been for the Kennedy assassination. While I make no claim to match your ability to determine the course of alternate histories, even foolish ones, I will note that by your own argument electing JFK did not get civil rights laws passed. Electing LBJ did not get civil rights laws passed. And no one who might have been elected since would have done any better. So how does that show elections' sole role as agents of change? Or in this case, show them as having any role at all?

Reverting to the real world, the one in which JFK was killed, do you think there would have even been civil rights legislation had it not been for all the on-the-streets activity which you find pointless if not distasteful?

Vietnam: Did electing JFK prevent Vietnam? Did electing LBJ stop it? Did electing Dick "I have a secret plan" Nixon stop it? Are you aware of the fact that one time, Pentagon analysts told LBJ the war could be won if only he'd commit another couple of hundred thousand troops and he responded by telling them to go back to their computers and determine how long it would take "250,000 angry Americans to climb that White House wall out there and lynch their president?" Or that before announcing his "Vietnamization" policy of slow withdrawal Nixon had a second speech drawn up, announcing a major escalation? And it was because of the scale of the so-called Moratorium demonstrations [of October 15, 1969] that three weeks later he announced the former instead of the latter?

(By the way, it's utterly untrue that the right didn't march. They just couldn't begin to match the numbers.)

Do you really imagine - I choose the word deliberately - that policy change happens only through electoral change and that electoral change happens in a vacuum apart from any broader considerations or conditions? A former colleague of mine, who was as opposed to electoral action as you are focused on it, used to say "Elections only ratify what the people have already decided." I don't go that far but an underlying point is valid: Elections are part of the process of change; they are not the cause of it.

Letters to the editor and to office holders are very effective

Based on your own argument, how is a letter to the editor effective? How does it - how can it - affect policy? How does it "change a thing" in a way that marches can't? By making some office-holder aware of a perspective? (And marches can't?) By provoking someone else to think about an issue? (And marches can't?) By reassuring someone they're not the only one who thinks that way? (And marches can't?) By inspiring someone to do more? (And marches can't? In fact, that's one of the things they do best: energize participants to do more than they otherwise might.)

And I admit to being amused by the reference to letters to office-holders; I was reminded of a similar argument I had some years ago with someone who, like you, had a narrow view of what constitutes useful tactics. He insisted that letters to office-holders was a waste of time, that only personal visits, face-to-face lobbying, had any merit and writing letters was a "cop out."

Did the right steal a march on the left in its emphasis on local elections, becoming aware that the focus of government was moving from DC to the states well before we did? Yes, they did and we're still playing catch-up. But to turn that into an argument that electoral politics is the only way to go and marches and other public actions are wastes of time that can change nothing, accomplish nothing, is more legerdemain than logic and I can't help but suspect functions more than a little as a justification for your own fears.

I say again, I will embrace all nonviolent means to advance justice and peace and these means are stronger when they reinforce each other rather than many being dismissed as the "illusions" of "you people." That does not strengthen those remaining, it weakens them, narrowing the political base on which they stand. And that, I repeat, is a serious, serious mistake, one we can't afford to make.

Just consider this: If marches and the like are so ineffective, so pointless, why in hell is the right so damned intent on rendering them invisible?

The famous quote attributed to Martin Niemoller is apocryphal, but a version seems relevant here: "First they came for the marches, but I didn't speak out because I wasn't a marcher...." Don't go that route.

I say do what you can the way you can to the degree you can. I have no time for "my way of organizing is better than your way" arguments. That is the real waste of time.

Updated by way of a footnote: The New York Times seems to have been at a different series of actions taking place in some other city. AP, Reuters, and CNN combined made one reference to a "verbal confrontation" when police forced protesters off the steps of the New York Public Library where they had, organizers later said, been told by police they could gather in advance of their march.

But according to the Times, it was "a day of disorder unmatched during convention week," one featuring a "wave of confrontations" that "erupted into clashes with police," including "a brawl with police" and "angry crowds ... screaming at delegates." And all that in the first two sentences.

But at the various staging areas - near Ground Zero, in Union Square, in Herald Square near Macy's, and outside the New York Public Library - the police began making arrests, sending the crowds into a frenzy. These confrontations followed several other events, some of which went of without incident with the police taking aggressive action to prevent disruptions.

"Frenzy?" Fren·zy, n. 1. A state of violent mental agitation or wild excitement. 2. Temporary madness or delirium.

Must be more of that liberal media bias.

Oh, and by the way, why isn't "police taking aggressive action" an "incident?"

"GOP Convention Viewers Prefer Fox" - headline on AP wire service story, August 31.

Huh. I never would have guessed.

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is the Friars Club?

JEOPARDY!
The Butler Did It for $200

Ted Cassidy filled this servant's shoes on "The Addams Family."

We do live in a strange world and stranger times. AP for August 30 says that

[i]n an interview on NBC-TV's "Today" show, Bush vowed to stay the course in the war on terror, saying perseverance in the battle would make the world safer for future generations. But he suggested an all-out victory against terrorism might not be possible.

Asked "Can we win?" Bush said, "I don't think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that the - those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world."

That remark, AP says, sparked an "inferno of criticism" by Democrats who "pounced" on Bush with scripted outrage.

The truth is, it was probably the most honest, truthful thing George Bush has ever said. Of course "we" can't - no one can - "win" a war on "terrorism." You can't "win" a war on a tactic, which is what terrorism is. I said as much on October 2, 2001:

In the wake of September 11, a blunt truth: Barring divine intervention, and I for one do not count on that, we will never "rid the world of terrorism." As long as there are people there will be those, both individuals and governments, prepared to commit the most venal cruelties against innocents to gain political ends. What we can hope to do is control terrorism, limit it, minimize it.

So for once George Bush spoke the truth - and the Democrats slammed him for it, taking advantage of the political blunder of facing reality.

Strange times indeed.

An AP article on Sunday brought a little comfort to this darkening corner of the universe.

The chilling sights and sounds of war fill newspapers and television screens worldwide, but war itself is in decline, peace researchers report.

In fact, the number killed in battle has fallen to its lowest point in the post-World War II period, dipping below 20,000 a year by one measure. ...

For months the battle reports and casualty tolls from Iraq and Afghanistan have put war in the headlines, but Swedish and Canadian non-governmental groups tracking armed conflict globally find a general decline in numbers from peaks in the 1990s.

The authoritative Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in a 2004 Yearbook report obtained by The Associated Press in advance of publication, says 19 major armed conflicts were under way worldwide in 2003, a sharp drop from 33 wars counted in 1991.

The Canadian organization Project Ploughshares, using broader criteria to define armed conflict, says in its new annual report that the number of conflicts declined to 36 in 2003, from a peak of 44 in 1995. ...

"Not only are the numbers declining, but the intensity" - the bloodshed in each conflict - "is declining," said [American scholar Monty G.] Marshall, founder of a University of Maryland program studying political violence.

The researchers credited both changing political situations in the world and the growth of international peacekeeping missions, which have tripled since 1999.

Footnote: One sobering note is that Andrew Mack, director of Project Ploughshares, said the figures don't include deaths from war-induced starvation and disease, deaths from ethnic conflicts not involving states, or unopposed massacres, such as in Rwanda in 1994.

The New York Times reported on Saturday that

Russia's security service announced Friday that investigators had found traces of an explosive in the wreckage of one of the two passenger airliners that crashed simultaneously on Tuesday, and declared its downing a terrorist act. ...

The evidence of an explosive aboard one of the planes, Sibir Airlines Flight 1047, is the strongest indication yet that deliberate acts, not human or mechanical errors as Russian officials initially suggested, were involved in the crashes, which killed a total of 89 people. If that is confirmed, as is now expected, the twin disasters would be the country's worst act of terrorism in the skies.

Officials said investigators were focusing attention on two women with Chechen names - one aboard each plane - as possible suicide bombers, raising the specter of an ominous new front in Russia's fight against terrorism.

In the last two years women known as "black widows" and said to be avenging the deaths of husbands, brothers or sons in Chechnya have been involved in some of the Russia's most lethal suicide attacks, including the bombing of a subway train in Moscow in February that killed at least 41 people. None have attacked the country's airliners before.

So why is this treated like it's just more or less ordinary news? Why isn't what appears to be simultaneous, coordinated terrorist attacks on two civilian airlines grabbing the headlines? Is it because

- no Americans were killed?
- Russian authorities appear to be leaning toward Chechens, not Muslims (even though the Times spent a significant portion of the article exploring a questionable connection to a Muslim group in Pakistan)?
- both?

A large number of peace organizations are organizing a National Memorial Procession for all the dead and wounded in the Iraq war to take place in Washington, DC, on Saturday, October 2. The procession will go from Arlington Cemetery to the White House under the slogan "Mourn the Dead. Heal the Wounded. End the War."

The American Friends Service Committee has more information here.

The case of Gilmore v. Ashcroft, now before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, is one of those that leaves you scratching your head because it seems like such a no-brainer that you can't imagine why it's even an issue.

On July 4, 2002, John Gilmore went to Oakland International Airport. He had a ticket in his own name with Southwest Airlines to Baltimore-Washington International Airport. ...

John politely refused to show his ID and was not allowed to fly.

John then went to San Francisco International Airport and attempted to fly to Washington, DC on United Airlines. There he was informed that if he was not willing to show ID he could fly, but only if he submitted to a far more intrusive search than what every passenger goes through at the security checkpoint.

He politely declined the search and again was not allowed to fly. ...

At San Francisco's airport, just like the rest of the country's airports, there was a sign that began "A Notice From the Federal Aviation Administration" and includes the sentence "passengers must present identification upon initial check-in."

John worked his way up the bureaucratic chain and was eventually told by United Airlines that there were security directives that mandated the showing of ID, but that he couldn't see them. These secret directives, issued by the Transportation Security Administration, are revised as often as weekly, and are transmitted orally rather than in writing. To make things even more confusing, these orally transmitted secret rules change depending on the airport.

EPIC picks up the story, noting that

Gilmore argues that the requirement [to show ID] violates numerous constitutional protections, including the rights to travel, petition and freely assemble, be free from unreasonable search and seizure, and have access to due process of law.

Mr. Gilmore is challenging the dismissal of his case in March by a federal district court. In that proceeding, the government not only refused to provide the court with the text of the law or regulation requiring airline passengers to show identification, but declined even to acknowledge whether the requirement exists. Furthermore, the district court judge accepted the government's assurance that the court did not have jurisdiction to review the law or regulation, failing to independently determine the legal basis for that claim. [Emphasis added.]

That is, people are being required to show proof of identity based on secret directives based on laws or regulations the very existence of which the government will not acknowledge! Now, a certain amount of secret information, that I can buy. Secret directives under very limited conditions, even that I suppose maybe I could see.

But secret laws? And a court - any court - agreed?

Unbelievable. We are at a dangerous point, perhaps even a tipping point. I don't like what I see. At some blue moments like this, I'm glad I'm the age I am so that I will very likely not live to see the world of 50 years in the future.

EPIC's amicus brief in the case is here in .pdf format; their page about travel privacy issues is here.

After Thomas Cameron Kincade, a convicted bank robber, was paroled in August 2000, his parole officer demanded he submit to providing a blood sample so that a record of his DNA could be added to the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) maintained by the FBI and made available to other law enforcement agencies. The requirement was in line with the DNA Analysis Backlog Elimination Act of 2000, which requires certain felons and parolees to submit a sample of their DNA to the government.

As explained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in a mailing on August 27,

The DNA Act does not require suspicion that an individual will commit or has committed another offense, nor that the sample be taken in order to aid in the investigation of a particular crime. Refusal to provide a DNA sample is a misdemeanor.

Kincade did refuse, claiming that being required to submit such information in the absence of reasonable suspicion violates Fourth Amendment guarantees against unreasonable search and seizure. Last October, three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with him.

On August 18, the full court overturned that decision in a close 6-5 decision.

Judge [Diarmuid] O'Scannlain's majority opinion noted that parolees are not entitled to the full extent of constitutional protections enjoyed by the public. The court concluded that the public interest served by collecting parolees' DNA outweighed parolees' "substantially diminished expectations of privacy...."

The Detroit News for August 19 has more.

"Parolees have demonstrated by their adjudicated criminal conduct a capacity and willingness to commit crimes serous enough to deprive them of liberty," O'Scannlain wrote. ...

The DNA program "helps minimize the pain and suffering recidivist offenders sow in our communities," he wrote.

I think that comes dangerously close to "once a criminal, always a criminal." And in fact, the danger goes well beyond that, since O'Scannlain also said that

"By contributing to the solution of past crimes, DNA profiling of qualified federal offenders helps bring closure to countless victims of crime who long have languished in the knowledge that perpetrators remain at large...."

Which clearly marks the program as a fishing expedition, as demanding people surrender personally-identifying information just to see if maybe it can be used against them somehow. But if that's the logic, why stop at parolees? Why not profile everyone? After all, it can hardly be argued that all unsolved crimes were committed by those now on parole. Does Judge O'Scannlain have no interest in bringing "closure" to those other cases?

In fact, it was only in a concurring opinion that the issue of what happens to the records later was raised.

A concurring opinion by Judge Gould emphasized that the court had not determined the rights of an individual "who has fully paid his or her debt to society, who has completely served his or her term, and who has left the penal system.... Once those previously on supervised release have wholly cleared their debt to society, the question must be raised: 'Should the CODIS entry be erased?'" Judge Gould noted that this question would have to be addressed in a future case,

leaving open the possibility that such a "future case" could decide that the records could be kept permanently, perhaps even referring to O'Scannlain reasoning about "recidivist offenders."

Judge Stephen Reinhardt, who wrote the ruling that was overturned, wrote in a dissent the new decision puts all Americans at risk "of having our DNA samples permanently placed on file in federal cyberspace."

"Even governments with benign intentions have proved unable to regulate or use wisely vast stores of information they collect regarding their citizens," Reinhardt wrote.

He noted that California's Proposition 69 would give state authorities the right to obtain DNA samples from people merely arrested - not convicted, arrested - for felonies. If they were cleared, the records would not be automatically destroyed; the formerly-accused would have to obtain a court order to have it done.

Judge Reinhardt's lengthy dissent ... chastised the majority's holding, stating, "Never has the [Supreme] Court approved of the government's construction of a permanent governmental database built from general suspicionless searches and designed for use in the investigation and prosecution of criminal offenses." Judge Reinhardt went on to caution, "Privacy erodes first at the margins, but once eliminated, its protections are lost for good, and the resulting damage is rarely, if ever, undone. Today, the court has opted for comprehensive DNA profiling of the least protected among us, and in so doing, has jeopardized us all."

For more information about the case, see EPIC's account here; to read EPIC's amicus brief on Kincade's behalf, click here for the .pdf file.

Footnote: The other excuse for allowing the demand was that the invasion of privacy is "minimal." Isn't that always the way? Every single intrusion is called "minimal." Back on March 29 in relation to another civil liberties issue, I mentioned a comic-strip story done some years ago by Jules Pfeiffer about atmospheric nuclear testing. After each test he showed a functionary loudly declaring "this test has added no appreciable amount of radioactive fallout to the atmosphere." But after enough of those "no appreciable amounts," people started to see "big black floating specks" in the air that grew larger with each new test. It's wise to remember that enough "minimals" add up to one "maximal." And the black specks are becoming clearly visible.

The New York Times for Monday reveals that columnist Robert Novak, who has repeatedly touted the anti-Kerry book by the Swift Boat Veterans for Lies, has an undisclosed tie to it: His son, Alex Novak, is the director of marketing for the book's publisher, the conservative publishing house Regnery.

The continuing drip of such information, I suspect, is why we're now seeing such as this:

Troy, Ohio (AP, August 29) - President Bush said opponent John Kerry's service was "more heroic" than his during Vietnam, in an interview shown Saturday on NBC News.

"I think him going to Vietnam was more heroic than my flying fighter jets," said Bush, who served in the Texas Air National Guard. "He was in harm's way and I wasn't. On the other hand, I served my country. Had my unit been called up, I would have gone."

What I think we have here is a sign that the Rethuglicans have decided they've gotten as much mileage out of this business as they're going to and want to turn it off before the counterattack gains any more traction.

Just on Saturday I was suggesting that the Madhi Army is outgrowing Moqtada al-Sadr and wondering how much control he actually had over it as opposed to functioning as a rallying point, an organizational logo, if you will. A test of that, I said, will be seeing if the militiamen really do turn in their weapons as he told them to.

From the BBC for August 28:

Correspondents say many of Mr Sadr's fighters left with their weapons, or concealed them in different parts of the city.

"They will hide their weapons but will not hand them over to the police or to the army..." his spokesman Sheikh Ahmed Shaibani told AFP news agency.

"They will be able to go back to their work whilst remaining an army."

So not only didn't they do as they were told, Sadr's office is already admitting they didn't do as they were told and acting like that's what they meant all along.

That didn't take long.

Footnote: Mysterious indeed are the ways of paranoia. As a result of his mediation in Najaf, al-Sistani is beng denounced as a "collaborator with the occupation" by contributors to a Russian website, wandering dazedly in a haze of revolutionary daydreaming. And at the same time we have the blogger Cosmic Iguana, who in effect labels Sistani a shill for Sadr.

Al Sadr has 9 lives, it seems as long as Sistani is around. ... And more U.S. soldiers have died for nothing as Sistani's brilliant non-violent campaign has undercut the U.S. just when it had Al-Sadr's men cornered.

"Blessed are the peacemakers" for they shall be reviled by both sides.

(In fairness, Cosmici earlier compared Sistani's involvement with the Salt March organized by Gandhi in 1930 in terms of undercutting the legitimacy of the occupier. But still....)

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is Andromeda?

FINAL JEOPARDY!
Organizations

The president of this social club founded by New York City entertainers in 1904 is called the abbot.

This is just too good. AP for August 29 tells us that Bunny has added a new phrase to our political vocabulary.

[I]n an interview with Time Magazine, the president suggested he had underestimated the struggle of the postwar period in Iraq.

"Had we to do it over again, we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success, being so successful so fast that an enemy that should have surrendered or been done in escaped and lived to fight another day," Bush said.

Catastrophic success? Just what in the flaming hell is that supposed to mean? The disaster that is Iraq happened because we won too easily? That's what he's saying? That if only our conquest was bloodier and took longer everything would be fine now? What kind of crap is he spewing?

Let's not forget, by the way, that this was the administration that said that the takeover of Iraq would be a "cakewalk" and we would be greeted as "liberators" with rose petals strewn in our path. So they predicted it would be easy and now are saying the troubles and pain are because it was easy. The logical conclusion is that they wanted there to be this kind of trouble and pain in Iraq, wanted ongoing strife, fear, and death.

Either that or they're just a sleazy cabal of despicable liars. Whatever.

Updated As in Demo-Day. It came off wonderfully, energetically, beautifully. While earlier news reports spoke of "tens of thousands," as the day wore on the reports turned to "over 100,000," "more than 200,000," "hundreds of thousands," and treated the organizers' estimate of 400,000 - far more than the expected 250,000 - as credible. (Having the media treat organizers' estimates as credible is itself an amazing accomplishment.) It was massive. It was impressive.

I've been trying to find news coverage of what happened after, when it was expected at least some people would head for Central Park, but so far no luck. But if even 0.5% headed that way, that still could be as many as 2,000 people. I had this image of a mass of people moving up the sidewalks toward the park with police blocking all the entrances to it.

But as I said, no news that I've seen.

Now something needs to be built from there, something that will extend beyond November 2. Remember: A John Kerry win does not mean the end of the Iraq war, far from it. I'd really like to see a counter-inaugural featuring the now-famous line "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

I've said it before: The work doesn't end on November 2, it begins. But this could be a good start.

Updated to say I finally found this, from the Wichita (KS) Eagle, quoting Monday's Washington Post:

The protest organizer, United for Peace and Justice, estimated the crowd at 500,000. It was, at best, a rough estimate. The Police Department offered no official estimate, but one officer in touch with the police command center at Madison Square Garden agreed that the crowd appeared to be close to a half-million. ...

After the march, hundreds of protesters in a more belligerent mood made their way to Times Square and blocked the entrances of two Midtown hotels while another group harassed Republican guests at a party at the Boathouse restaurant in Central Park. But a post-march gathering on the Great Lawn of the park was peaceful.

Still no word on the size of the Great Lawn crowd.

Developing.... (Whoops, sorry, thought I was Matt Drudge for a second there.)

My day off from blogging kinda. And I've actually had a good day. For personal reasons and much to my great frustration, I couldn't make it to New York, which would have made the day much better. But I did enjoy my day. So there.

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is an arrow?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Constellations for $2000

This constellation of a lady chained to a rock contains the nearby M31 galaxy.

TOMORROW'S FINAL JEOPARDY! CATEGORY
Organizations

I only just heard about this and what I know is pretty much limited to what's here, but I thought it worth passing on.

Veronza Bowers was a member of the Black Panther Party who was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of murdering a US Park Ranger, a crime of which he still maintains his innocence.

After a September 12, 2000, parole hearing, the regional parole examiner recommended parole, but the following February the National Parole Commission declared without explanation it saw "no new and relevant information" and so overturned the regional examiner's action.

This, however, is where it turns from frustrating toward outrageous: On April 7, 2004, Bowers had been in federal prison for 30 years. By federal law, once someone has been in prison for 30 years, they must be granted parole unless the National Parole Commission makes a positive finding based on credible evidence that the person has failed to adapt to the rules of the prison or is likely to commit crimes if released.

Despite having made no such finding and despite having granted a waiver of a final parole hearing, just 18 hours before Bowers' scheduled release the NPC rescinded the waiver and ordered that Bowers continue to be held. According to his supporters, even the officials at the prison were shocked by the order.

A suit has been filed against the NPC, but in the current atmosphere of fear of any sort of - or even history of - radicalism, even on the part of someone who has supposedly become a "model" prisoner, the result is hard to predict.

So far, the support group is not asking for any action except letters of support to him and/or his attorney. If you want to get the addresses or more details, there is a website at www.veronza.org.

It's not really important, but I just thought it worth noting not so much for its political impact but for what it reveals about the ways of the powerful.

Austin (AP, August 28) - In a video posted on the Internet, Ben Barnes, a former Democratic speaker of the Texas House, said he is ashamed he helped President Bush and the sons of other wealthy families get into the Texas Air National Guard in 1968 so they could avoid serving in Vietnam.

"I got a young man named George W. Bush into the National Guard when I was lieutenant governor of Texas, and I'm not necessarily proud of that, but I did it," Barnes said in the 45-second video, which was recorded May 27 before a group of John Kerry supporters in Austin. Barnes, who was House speaker when Bush entered the Guard, later became lieutenant governor.

He said he became ashamed after walking through the Vietnam Memorial and looking at the names of people who died.

Shrub has always denied that there was any family influence involved in getting him into the Guard. That's an example of what I used to call "a Reagan truth," but I supposed the name should be updated. Anyway, it was defined as "a statement that is technically true but phrased in such a way as to give a misleading impression - that is, a lie."

The "Bush truth" here is that he says there was no "family" influence involved. That may well be true - because according to Barnes, it was a friend of the family, not an actual family member, who made the call that resulted in him - also not a family member - using his influence to get Bunny into the Guard.

John Kerry, once a man who stood for something, has turned into a smarmy, wishy-washy, corporate butt-kissing twerp trying to prove how macho he is. But George Bush is just a, a - words fail me - just a slimy creep.

More trouble for touchscreen voting. And who is more deserving?

Florida state law requires a manual recount of votes in any election decided by a small enough margin or when there's a proper and timely request.

But 15 counties in the state use touchscreen voting machines that provide no voter-verified printout. When elections supervisors in some of those counties asked the state what they should do, Secretary of State Glenda Hood issued a ruling banning manual recounts in touchscreen counties.

A coalition including government watchdogs and other interest groups sued the state, arguing the law requires provisions for hand recounts in every county, no matter what voting technology is used.

[On Friday], Administrative Law Judge Susan Kirkland agreed, writing that state law clearly contemplates "that manual recounts will be done on each certified voting system, including the touchscreen voting systems,"

reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

The most likely outcome will be that Hood will appeal, delaying any change until after the elections, even though election officials admit they could do a hand recount if they had to. It would be time-consuming, but it could be done.

However, an even better answer to those who think like Hood was offered by "Mike" in a posting on Techdirt.com:

Those who support the current e-voting machines are complaining that this ruling creates an impossible situation: they can't conduct manual recounts because there's nothing to count. They seem to be missing the point. If there's nothing to recount, then shouldn't that mean the machines don't conform to state laws?

Like they say, "there is nothing so obvious as the truth - once someone has said it."

Labels: Constitutional rights, voting issues

Italy 1 - Iraq 0

Bronze to Italy.

So there's a peace, or at least a peace deal, in Najaf. What remains to be seen is if this is actually a peace or just a truce, an actual settlement or just another lull.

And it may also reveal an answer to a question I've been wondering about: Just how much control does Moqtada al-Sadr have over "his" Mahdi Army?

I admit I was doubtful about Ali al-Sistani's initiative. I only became confident that something would actually come of it when I heard that as part of the agreement, Sadr had agreed to a specific deadline by which his supporters would leave the Imam Ali shrine. Without that, it could easily have become just another talk session.

Recall some of the recent chronology: Sadr refused to meet himself with a delegation from the Iraqi National Conference who were carrying a peace proposal, leaving them to lower-level officials. But the next day, he "accepted" that same proposal. However, he wanted to "negotiate the terms of implementation" but only with representatives of the conference. He also insisted there be a ceasefire and withdrawal of foreign forces from the city first - something I knew the US and Allawi would not accept, as it would in effect restore the status quo that existed before this latest outbreak of violence.

Sadr, who had previously insisted that he would not deal with the "illegitimate" Allawi government, then said he wanted to meet with the same national conference delegation he would not meet with before - and they could bring along a representative of the interim government. His representatives keep insisting he wanted to arrange a ceasefire as the military pressure increased.

(Sidebar: I can't help but comment that for someone who has been described by a number of people - including me - as having a "martyr complex," Sadr seems singularly adept at avoiding final confrontations.)

So while I was convinced that Sistani's intentions were honest (the fact that he came back somewhat early from his recuperation from an angioplasty added weight to that notion), I wasn't sure he could pull it off, despite his undeniable stature and influence.

My doubts grew when Sadr's supposed acceptance of Sistani's proposals were followed by bickering over the handover of the keys to the mosque, the symbolic transfer of authority. In effect, Sadr wanted to hand over the keys while his supporters still occupied the grounds, which would have involved Sistani at least symbolically in the defense of the mosque against any attack by US or Iraqi forces. Sistani didn't bite and Sadr, slowly but surely losing ground militarily and facing what most observers said was certain defeat, relented and agreed to a specific time by which his supporters would leave the mosque.

That was the key that enabled Allawi to agree as well: Sadr was no longer talking about leaving or negotiating about leaving, he was leaving. The unacceptable status quo was no longer. And even if the "victory" was in significant ways symbolic, since it involved a pledge to take no action against Sadr or his militia, still it was enough because it did not represent "backing down," which well could have been disastrous for Allawi's fragile reign.

US military commanders also agreed even though they were not happy about it. They were in no position to say "no" when Allawi said "yes" and still maintain the fiction that Allawi's government is the ultimate authority.

And so

[t]he crisis appeared resolved Friday morning when al-Sadr issued a statement broadcast over the shrine's loudspeakers ordering his Mahdi Army militia fighters to lay down their arms and leave Najaf and Kufa.

"To all my brothers in the Mahdi Army ... you should leave Kufa and Najaf without your weapons, along with the peaceful masses," his statement said.

Thousands of Shiite pilgrims, who had come at the behest of al-Sistani, streamed into the shrine and mixed with the militants who had been holed up inside. The whole group then filed out, with some of the militants defiantly chanting, "Muqtada, Muqtada."

The doors of the shrine were then shut and the keys were handed over to al-Sistani's office, a symbolic and crucial step in ending the crisis.

But where the crisis ends, the questions start. Again, Sadr specifically called on his followers to leave Najaf and Kufa without their weapons.

"Do this so they won't condemn you and they won't condemn me," the speaker said, reading a letter from al-Sadr over the mosque's sound system.

And indeed, dozens of Kalashnikov rifles were piled in front of Sadr's office and a senior al-Sadr representative said most Mahdi Army members had turned in their weapons.

[B]ut thousands of others were believed to be still armed, and some were seen pushing carts full of machine-guns and rocket launchers through a narrow alley.

Which raises the question I offered at the beginning: How much does Sadr actually control "his" militia? As part of the truce in June, his supporters who were not from Najaf were supposed to leave and go home. But as I noted in a post on August 12, not all of them did. So how many of them now will heed his call not only to leave the city but to surrender their weapons before they do? How much is Sadr in charge?

Almost unknown to the world before its violent uprising last April against US forces in Baghdad and elsewhere [the Christian Science Monitor reported on Thursday], the Mahdi Army is emerging as a well-organized parallel government that aspires to govern Shiites according to its religious principles. Its models are the violent militant organizations (designated as terrorists groups by the US) with social programs like Lebanon's Hizbullah and Hamas in Gaza, and its goals are at least as ambitious.

In most cities where the Mahdi Army is present, there are Mahdi Army religious courts for resolving disputes and punishing criminals; Mahdi Army police patrols; and even Mahdi Army town councils for planning social programs.

All of these services pay political dividends, earning the admiration of many Shiites who don't necessarily support Sadr or his militia. ...

[I]n Sadr City, the news from Najaf seemed quite distant. For Mahdi Army fighters here, the war is just beginning. And even for those who have been severely wounded say they are preparing for the next battle.

Abu Hassan, one of Hassan's patients, says the fighters in Najaf will stay and fight to the last man. "This is their home territory, and their own families will encourage them to fight and die, and then they will go to heaven," he says.

I don't know what reaction he had to the agreement to leave the shrine or if he really had any reaction at all. The point here is that he identified the struggle in terms of the fighters, not in terms of Sadr. No matter how much personal allegiance there may be, no matter now much he stands as a symbol, it seems to me that the Mahdi Army as a movement is outgrowing Sadr.

Two tests of that will come up soon: One, will Najaf and Kufa really become "no weapons zones?" Or just "no weapons seen in the open right now zones?" The other is how will other towns with a Mahdi Army presence react? What, in particular, will happen in Sadr City, which is seeing its own war of attrition, except that, unlike Najaf, it's unclear who's being attritted?

A witness said a U.S. tank shelled targets along the volatile Haifa Street in central Baghdad, a dangerous stretch that has earned the nickname "Little Falluja."

Small arms fire and explosions were heard in the morning hours, and 12 U.S. troops were wounded in hand-grenade attacks. Eight people have been detained.

This is not the end. It is at most a transition.

Footnote: In a noble attempt at spin,

[a]l-Sadr spokesman Sheikh Ahmed al-Sheibani on Friday said a critical point had been made in the three-week standoff - to prove to the United States and the interim Iraqi government that religious authority is the primary power in Iraq.

Of course, since Sadr had supposedly accepted a peace proposal from the national conference and had declared his willingness to negotiate with them (and even to involve a member of the Allawi government) before Sistani got involved, it's kind of hard to credit that argument, but it's still a good attempt. Not up to Shrub's standards, certainly, but hey, they're not as experienced.

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is Orion?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Constellations for $1200

Sagitta, which represents this item, landed in the sky, not far from Sagittarius himself.

Back on March 11 I posted an item reporting the assertion of arms control expert William Arkin that the US was about to deploy "a new, untested weapon" in Iraq. It's a powerful megaphone that could produce 145 decibels at 300 yards. That's more than four times louder than the threshold of pain, sufficient to cause not only severe pain but permanent hearing loss and possible cellular damage.

I don't know if that was ever actually deployed in Iraq, but I do know of one place where it or it's first cousin has been deployed: New York City.

Mercury News (CA) for August 27, in an article about how technology is affecting protest, reported that

[e]arlier this month, the New York Police Department showed off a machine called the Long Range Acoustic Device, developed for the military and capable of blasting at an earsplitting 150 decibels - as loud as a firecracker, a jet engine taking off or artillery fire at 500 feet, according to the Noise Center at the League for the Hard of Hearing.

The NYPD said it would use the machine to direct crowds to safety if there's a terrorist attack or remind protesters where they're allowed to march. Police said they wouldn't use the earsplitting screeching noise feature at the convention.

"It's only to communicate in large crowds," Inspector Thomas Graham of the police department's crowd control unit said.

"Communicate" as in "What we have here is a failure to communicate?"

What's being "communicated" to me is that the NYPD is in possession of a device intended as a weapon to be used for dominance, for crowd control and dispersion through the infliction of pain on a mass scale. Its "trust us" reassurances do not impress me.

Remember the suit against the so-called "partial birth" abortion ban that caused a stir when a judge in New York upheld a demand by Attorney General Burntfarm for access to patients' confidential medical records?

The feds lost.

New York (Reuters, August 26) - A federal judge on Thursday ruled against the government's ban on so-called partial birth abortions, saying the measure signed into law last year by President Bush was unconstitutional.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Richard Casey of Manhattan followed a similar decision by a San Francisco judge in June that barred the U.S. Justice Department from enforcing the ban.

Casey, perhaps showing why he upheld Ruinedland's intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship, called the procedure, properly called intact dilation and extraction, "gruesome." Still, he said, previous Supreme Court rulings allowed for it in the absence of a medical consensus that it had no value for pregnant women seeking abortions.

"While Congress and lower courts may disagree with the Supreme Court's constitutional decision, that does not free them from their constitutional duty to obey the Supreme Court's rulings," Casey said.

Well, the GOPpers always say they're against "activist judges." Apparently, Casey agrees.

Labels: abortion rights

The numbers from the Census Bureau report released Thursday are cold and unrelenting.

- The number of poor people in the US increased from 34.6 million in 2002 to 35.9 million in 2003, or 12.5% of the population. It was the third straight increase.

- The childhood in poverty rate rose from 16.7% to 17.6%, the largest one-year jump since 1991.

- The number of people without health insurance went from 43.6 million in 2002 to 45 million in 2003, meaning 15.6% of the public has no protection. That, too, represented a third consecutive increase.

- Inflation-adjusted median household income, the level at which half of households earn more and half earn less, fell for the second straight year to $43,318 - just slightly below the 2002 level but 3.4% behind the 2000 level.

- Women working full time earned 76% of what men did, a drop of a percentage point from the year before.

- Asians had the highest median household income, followed by non-Hispanic whites, Hispanics, and blacks. Black median household income was only 62% that of whites and only 54% that of Asians.

- Non-Hispanic whites were the least likely to be in poverty or without health insurance; Hispanics and blacks fared the worse in both areas. The black poverty rate was nearly three times that of non-Hispanic whites.

The report generated the usual spate of blame-dodging and finger-pointing between the major political parties, all of which is frankly wholly and completely irrelevant. While some proposals are certainly better than others, these numbers are not going to be changed to any meaningful degree by sound bites ("Tax cuts! Tax cuts! Tax cuts!") or bumper stickers ("Put People First"). They may be ameliorated, but not altered significantly.

Because the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our presidents but in our economy, in its very structure, its very nature. The fact is, an economy like ours, built on perpetual growth, built on want want more more, built on hierarchy and an over-arching (and false) vision of competition as the source of all progress, cannot function without significant levels of poverty and significant differences among groups. The winners require the existence of the losers to maintain their victory.

Until we admit that, until we admit that there are powerful forces in our society that benefit from the existence of poverty, discrimination, and despair, we can shove those numbers around a few percent (and yes, less suffering, even if just a little less, is better than more suffering, but that's not the point here) but we will not achieve actual justice.

Taking a grudging step in the general direction of reality,

a new report to Congress focuses on federal research indicating that emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are the only likely explanation for global warming over the last three decades.

In delivering the report to Congress yesterday, an administration official, Dr. James R Mahoney, said it reflected "the best possible scientific information" on climate change. ...

The report is among those submitted regularly to Congress as a summary of recent and planned federal research on shifting global conditions of all sorts.

That from Thursday's New York Times.

The report, pointing to recent studies using climatological models, says that shifts in the sun's energy output and other natural factors can explain the rise in temperature from 1900 to 1950 but not that in more recent times, particularly the sharp and continuing climb over the last 35 years.

It also says the accumulating emissions pose newly identified risks to farmers, citing studies showing that carbon dioxide promotes the growth of invasive weeds far more than it stimulates crops and that it reduces the nutritional value of some rangeland grasses.

It may be hard for the White House to walk away from this report, as it has from previous ones, since it's accompanied by a letter signed by Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham, Secretary of Commerce Don Evans, and John Marburger, Shrub's science adviser. But that doesn't mean they won't try. Even though the Times refers to it as a "striking shift," Mahoney, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and the director of government climate research, tended to downplay its significance.

In an interview, he said the report was mainly an update on the overall climate research program and was not intended to be a conclusive "state of the science" summary of the administration's thinking. A series of 21 reports are promised on particular issues in coming years, he said, and the studies on climate models, agriculture and other subjects mentioned in the new report are "significant but not definitive."

That can easily be translated to the old "need more study" dodge, which is likely why environmental scientists were not bowled over by the news, as Reuters reported on Friday.

Some said the Bush administration report ... might simply be a bid to reach out to environmentally minded voters before the November presidential election.

"I don't think there is any policy shift at all," said Steve Sawyer, climate policy director at the environmental group Greenpeace. "It's election season and Bush may be trying to reach out to the elusive center." ...

None saw Bush as a convert to concerted international action.

And why would they be so cynical? Maybe it's because Bush himself gives them reason.

In an interview with the New York Times, published on its Web site, Bush was asked why his administration had changed its position. "Ah, did we?" Bush replied. "I don't think so."

The report can be found online here.

Labels: global warming

You know, I'm beginning to think we've misunderstood the GOP. It's not populated with nutsoids bullies who would be shunned in any society that didn't have its collective head up its ass as a result of being uninformed when it's not being misinformed by a media composed largely of boot-licking wusses. Rather, it's populated with brilliant performance artists, satirists who will any day now throw off the disguise and cry out in one huge gleeful voice "GOTCHA!" I mean, how else to explain the utter contempt for logic and the phenomenal depths of self-pitying paranoia?

For example, Greg Palast noted that the blog of the Rethuglican National Committee linked to an article in the Manchester (NH) Union-Leader claiming that "people who hate Republicans" have all kinds of dastardly plans for the RNC convention including releasing "swarms of mice," giving phony directions, and throwing pies. These are described as attempts to "terrorize" the delegates and the people as "junior terrorists." Mice. Throwing pies. Terrorism. See the connection? (The whole bizarro piece is here.)

Piling absurdity on top of inanity, the GOP link refers to "protestors supporting John Kerry" even though the article does not call them that.

Oh, there's more. The level of satire on this RNC blog page is endless. Another item mocks DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe for saying the party was not supporting the NYC protests.

Really? Then explain how Nashville circuit designer Cecily Letendre decided against joining her fellow travelers to NYC and instead just donate money to the Kerry campaign.

That's right, they found one person - one - among the others mentioned in a New York Times article on people going to the demo who thought it would be more effective to donate to Kerry and claimed that as proof that the marchers are "part and parcel of the Democrat apparatus." (Oh, and note the clever way they worked in the phrase "fellow travelers." These people are a hoot.)

Having just finished Eric Alterman's book What Liberal Media? (I know, I know, hardly hot off the presses), this, however, may be my favorite - particularly because of the subtlety involved.

And Speaking of Media Bias…
You know the drill – drop by Google News and enter ‘Ed Gillespie,’ then count the articles headlining DNC boss Terry McAuliffe. The liberal bias is sooooo glaring it’s almost embarrassing.

A double-dose of subtlety, in fact. The first, mundane, one being the safe knowledge that most of the people who read this won't actually do the search, they'll just internalize the implication (which is an additional subtlety, in fact, since the item doesn't actually claim anything, it just hints at a conclusion without having to take responsibility for reaching one - a common GOPper tactic but still worth noting). The other, deeper, one is that even if the facts implied were true they would not show what it's implied they show.

That is, suppose you did google "Ed Gillespie" and found a lot of the results headlined Terry McAuliffe. What that could indicate is that the media doesn't write about McAuliffe without mentioning Gillespie as well. How would that show a "liberal bias?"

Of course, it wouldn't. It's a fantasy. If you wanted to search for bias in name-dropping, you'd not only have to google "Ed Gillespie" to look for hits headlining Terry McAuliffe, you'd also have to do the reverse, googling McAuliffe and looking for Gillespie headlines. And then you'd have to search for "Ed Gillespie" NOT "Terry McAuliffe" and also the reverse to look for articles that mention just one without the other.

But of course that would take some minimal understanding of logic and some minimal concern with accuracy, so ignoring it was no problem for this crowd.

Footnote: I actually did the searches I just mentioned. It only took a few minutes even with my dialup connection. These are the results:

"Ed Gillespie" - 1360 hits
"Terry McAuliffe" - 1510 hits
"Ed Gillespie" NOT "Terry McAuliffe" - 1170 hits
"Terry McAuliffe" NOT "Ed Gillespie" - 1290 hits
"Ed Gillespie" AND "Terry McAuliffe" - 167 hits

In the first two cases, I scanned the top 60 headlines. In each case, not one headline mentioned the other by name, although some did headline the other party. If you can find bias in those numbers, you're ready to be a GOP activist.

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
Who is Aaron Burr?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Constellations for $400

This hunter's dogs Canis Major and Canis Minor are positioned at his heels.

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The pattern is now familiar, so familiar that, like most things that get absorbed into a culture, it's been applied to areas well beyond its original meaning.

But it was new, revolutionary, in fact, in 1969 when Elisabeth Kubler-Ross labeled and explained the "five stages of grief" associated with death. Her book, On Death and Dying, became a standard text for those dealing with terminally-ill patients and those around them and was central to her being named among the "100 Most Important Thinkers" of the 20th century by Time magazine in 1999.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, 78, having gone through her own five stages, died of natural causes Tuesday at her home in Scottsdale, Arizona.

"For the past two years, I have — thanks to a series of strokes — been totally dependent on others for basic care," she wrote at the time [1997]. "Every day is spent struggling to get from bed to a chair to the bathroom and back again. My only wish has been to leave my body, like a butterfly shedding its cocoon, and finally merge with the great light."

She was ridiculed by some for her later beliefs in near-death experiences, reincarnation, and channelling the spirits of the dead, which were perhaps her own way of bargaining. I don't share those beliefs, but I won't mock her for holding to them.

In fact, I'm perhaps best described as an agnostic on life after death. I don't believe in it because I see no basis for doing so. At the same time, I say with Alexander Alekhine "I can't conceive that there will be nothing left of me when I am gone." Yet I know that may simply be my own failure of imagination, or even an inability of the human mind to imagine its own non-existence (since to imagine it there must be something doing the imagining). All of which means that while I believe the mind, the spirit if you will, which the more we look the more it depends on physical processes within the brain, does not survive the body, I can't absolutely rule it out.

So no, I will not mock her. Instead I will celebrate her life and the understanding she brought to and of both life and death.

Right-winger Michelle Malkin's new book, In Defense of Internment (which I note for the record I'm calling a book only because of the combination of cover, binding, and pages with print on them, not because it actually contains anything of value), uses bogus and long-discredited claims to argue that the shameful World War II internment of Japanese-Americans was a "military necessity" that caused only "inconvenience" - and does that in order to justify active racial profiling of Arab-Americans and Muslims today.

The August 24 Daily Star (Lebanon) has a good commentary on her "book," which includes this sentence, which is what I wanted to note:

"[W]hen we are under attack, 'Racial profiling' - or more precisely, threat profiling - is justified," she argues.

Note that well: "Threat profiling" is a "more precise" rendering of racial profiling - thus equating "threat" with "race." What Malkin proposes to do is to take a characteristic ("threat to the US" - or, more likely, "threat to me, who cares about you") that might apply to some members of a group (Muslim- and Arab-Americans), to make that characteristic a defining one for the group as a whole ("race = threat"), and then to judge every individual member of that group in terms of that claimed definition.

That, friends, is a definition of racism.

Micelle Malkin is a racist. Period.

Footnote: She tries to slip loose by asserting "Make no mistake: I am not advocating rounding up all Arabs or Muslims and tossing them into camps." But

[w]hatever reservations Malkin may have about a mass incarceration of Arab- and Muslim-Americans are confined to a single sentence: "In part because of the geographical dispersion of the current threat of Islamofascism, it is hard to imagine parallel circumstances under which America would be compelled to replicate something on the scale of the West Coast evacuation and relocation during World War II."

That is, it's just not practical. Oh well, then, I guess that's okay. I am SO reassured.

Found this on the website of the Wichita (KS) Eagle for Thursday:

Madrid, Spain - Knee-deep in red mush, tens of thousands of revelers pelted each other with tons of ripe tomatoes Wednesday in Spain's messiest summer party.

Police in the eastern village of Bunol - population 10,000 - said some 36,000 people waged the hour-long food fight, bathing themselves, the walls and streets with 140 tons of fruit projectiles.

It all started with a pistol shot at high noon, after which six trucks unloaded fruit ammunition for Spaniards and tourists from as far away as Japan who had gathered to paste each other in the decades-old battle called "La Tomatina."

What's Spanish for joie de vivre?

Footnote: Yes, I know about waste of food, coulda woulda shoulda, and the rest. But if this "summer party" did not occur, would that fruit have gone to market? Would it have been donated to feed the hungry? Since I think it's safe to answer "no" to both those questions, I don't accept the objection.

AP reported on Thursday on a momentous occasion: the 100th anniversary of the banana split.

Ice cream aficionados believe David E. Strickler, a 1906 graduate of [the University of Pittsburgh]'s School of Pharmacy, created the first banana split in 1904 when he was an apprentice at Tassell Pharmacy in Latrobe. ...

As with any first, restaurant and pharmacy owners around the nation have disputed Strickler's story. But the National Ice Cream Retailers Association recently honored Latrobe as the dessert's birthplace.

There's convincing evidence that supports Strickler's claim, said Greubel, who co-wrote "Ice Cream Joe: The Valley Dairy Story and America's Love Affair with Ice Cream."

Strickler in 1905 asked the Westmoreland Glass Co. in Grapeville to make "banana boat" dishes. The order form still exists and is on display at Latrobe's historical center, Greubel said.

The University celebrated by declaring Wednesday "Banana Split Day" and serving about 4,000 ice cream cones to students, family members, and others returning to campus for the new school year.

He's been compared to Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen. But he plays classical as well as rock and blues. While he performs solo for the more serious, classical pieces, in a group, he plugs his instrument in "goes nuts," playing the strings with his teeth or using a pedal board. On a recent tour of Japan, a joint performance with the popular band Tube drew a crowd of 35,000.

All of which is pretty cool since his instrument is the ukulele, all four strings and two octaves of it.

Our virtuoso's name is Jake Shimabukuro, a fourth-generation Japanese-American from Honolulu. He's been playing the ukulele since he was four. He says he still considers the uke a "toy" because it's so much fun to play but wants to convince people to appreciate the instrument as an untapped source of musical performance.

Who knows? He just might do it.

Back on August 11, I referred to an article in the International Herald Tribune addressing the fact that the World Bank, charged with reducing poverty in developing nations, has no idea if its programs work or not.

According to Nadia Martinez, Latin America coordinator for the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network at the Institute for Policy Studies, writing in the August 16 Christian Science Monitor, it's even worse: The Bank knows that at least some of its policies don't help - and it doesn't care.

After years of pressure to make the World Bank more accountable for its investments, the bank's president, James Wolfensohn, pledged in Prague in 2000 to undertake a review of the World Bank's support for the extractive industries, particularly oil, gas, and mining.

A year later, Mr. Wolfensohn appointed Emil Salim, a former Indonesian environment minister who served under the Suharto dictatorship, to lead the review. Dr. Salim was also on the board of a coal company at the time of the appointment (though he resigned later). With those credentials, most of the environmentalists, faith-based groups, development advocates, and human rights activists who'd demanded this assessment were pessimistic about ever seeing the bank change.

To every observer's surprise, the report concluded in January that World Bank support for fossil fuel and other mining projects simply doesn't alleviate poverty.

What's more, the report said the Bank should take steps to ensure that money gained from such projects is used for such things as education and health programs instead of for weapons, to guarantee the rights of people, especially indigenous people, affected by those projects, and to get out of financing them at all by 2008.

Instead of acting on the report, the Bank sat on it for six months until the board of directors finally considered it on August 3, at which time it

opted merely to endorse minimal commitments to change the way the bank does business. For example, while they pledged to increase renewable energy financing by 20 percent annually, the base line the lender is using is so low that the target for renewable support in 2005 is lower than the bank's loans for renewables in 1994. Currently fossil fuel financing at the World Bank exceeds renewable lending by a factor of 17 to 1.

What's more, the developing nations targeted by the Bank don't even get the benefit of the energy produced, Martinez says, citing IPS studies that say 82% of the oil-extraction projects actually supply consumers in the US and Europe and

the main beneficiaries of World Bank fossil-fuel extractive projects are Halliburton, Shell, ChevronTexaco, Total, and ExxonMobil, in that order, and the list continues.

The World Bank, that is, functions not as a means to help the poor escape poverty by economic development but as one to help the industrialized West continue to exploit them. There comes a point where reform is a pipe dream and the best thing to do is junk what you've got and start over. Check out the 50 Years is Enough campaign.

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is Isuzu?

JEOPARDY!
TV Commercials for $1000

A peanut-butter eating Alexander Hamilton buff can't articulate the name of this vice-president since he hasn't "got milk."

Probably the most amusingly endearing quality of neocons is their childish inability to deal with the real world. They're like 6-year olds who imagine themselves blasting aliens or as Spiderman swinging through the streets of New York - or perhaps, like I did, as blasting home run after home run in their rookie year in the majors. And no matter how many times you try to hit the ball out of your hand and miss, still you see it flying over the fence.

In an article in the International Herald Tribune on Tuesday about cracks in the previously-solid front of neocon support for the war in Iraq, there is this:

Others are redoubling their arguments for the invasion of Iraq, contending that it should be the first step in a campaign to transform the region. In the next issue of Commentary magazine, Norman Podhoretz, who helped found the neoconservative movement in the 1970s, has written a 37-page defense of the Bush administration's foreign policy.

In "World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win," he argues that the United States should now help seek the liberation of other Middle Eastern countries to help drain the swamp where Islamic radicalism breeds, just as the cold war helped liberate the Soviet Union.

"Like anybody else in the world who is sane, I am very much worried about Iran gaining nuclear capacity," Podhoretz said in an interview Friday. "I am not advocating the invasion of Iran at this moment, although I wouldn't be heartbroken if it happened."

Apparently, in his mind, the war has been a resounding success, Iraq is liberated and we should spread exactly the same liberation across the entire region. Isn't he just the cutest thing? Just look at him in his little Spiderman outfit....

I'm not really surprised, especially after what happened the other day, but I'm still furious. From VOA News:

A New York State Supreme Court judge has rejected a last minute attempt by an anti-Republicans group to hold a massive rally in New York City's Central Park.

United for Peace and Justice, a nationwide coalition of anti-war, anti-Bush groups, sued New York last week for refusing to give the group a permit to hold a demonstration in the Park on Sunday, the day before the Republican Party Convention officially begins.

With an utterly straight face and utter contempt for logic, the city continued to argue that it could not allow the rally in Central Park because the crowd would damage the recently-renovated Great Lawn, a site that for scores of years has been host to mass demonstrations, outdoor concerts, and other large-scale activities. Now, however, the city apparently believes it can put it off limits to any protest with a "keep off the grass" sign.

Disgustingly, the courts appear ready to agree.

After months of being stonewalled, UFPJ reluctantly agreed to the city's one and only offer for a rally site: the West Side Highway, a hideously bad site. After informing people of its decision, the group was inundated with complaints about the lack of shade, the lack of shelter, the lack of nearby toilet facilities, the lack of availability of water - not to mention that the rally would be stretched out like a string with most of the people unable to hear - or, lacking binoculars, even see - what was happening on the stage.

As a result, the group withdrew its agreement and went to court.

But the city's attorney, Jonathan Pines, said it is too late to change sites and provide adequate security.

"We could have been here in June. We could have been here in July," he said. "No, we are here now with mere days left."

Which is a pile of crap. The delay was cause by the city's attempts to prevent a rally at all - indeed, I'm utterly convinced that had they been able to come up with a way, they would have blocked the march as well. You can be damn sure that if UFPJ had sued in June or July, the city would have argued that such a suit was "premature" while "negotiations are still going on." Then again, being manipulative hypocrites is what people like Pines get paid for. But that of course didn't matter to the court.

Judge Jacqueline Silberman agreed [with Pines], saying UPJ was "guilty of inexcusable and inequitable delay" in bringing the case to court.

Which just goes to show that judges can be just as much in contempt of court as anyone else - that is, contempt of the court system and the justice it's supposed to be capable of dispensing, which is what the charge is supposed to mean, rather than its more usual interpretation of "wounding the judge's ego."

I say that the first time - and I mean the very first time - the city approves a permit for use of the Great Lawn for any large-scale activity, individual members of UFPJ should institute a massive civil suit against the city for violation of constitutional rights, charging that granting the permit proves the city's basis for denying a permit for the protest was a lie and content-based, which is unconstitutional.

It's likely that a significant number of people will head for Central Park at the end of the march anyway. No doubt, the city will try to stop them. It would be an interesting - and I think very good - thing if hundreds (I can dream thousands) of people refused to obey an order to disperse, preferring nonviolent civil disobedience.

By the way, just in case you didn't know, "what happened the other day" was that a federal court refused to order the city to issue a permit for a smaller gathering in Central Park on Saturday, arguing that the city was within its rights to consider "security." Just what security threat was presented by a rally two days before the RNC opens was, not surprisingly, unexplained by a logic that would allow the city to ban any protest at any time simply by saying it had "security concerns."

Footnote: There is planned nonviolent CD - a march and die-in - at the convention on Tuesday. Information can be found at the War Resisters League site here.

Sprites, jets, and elves don't sound like the stuff of science, but they are. They are the names given to various colored flashes of light seen high in the Earth's atmosphere, flashes of light that until recently scientists believed were figments of the over-active imaginations of airline pilots, who usually were the ones to report them.

It's now most commonly believed that they are, in effect, upwardly-striking lightning from the tops of thunderstorms or the remnants of the "cells" that make them up.

In a simple form, lightning happens when the potential difference between in the charges in a stormcloud and the ground below become great enough to overcome the electrical resistance of the air between. But that surge of charge from cloud to ground can leave in its wake a new potential difference: between the cloud and the ionosphere above it. If and when that potential difference is great enough, a jolt of charge can slam upwards to the ionosphere.

It's all part of a global electrical circuit which is now being studied by satellites.

The phenomena are difficult to study as they occur between 50 and 100km (30-60 miles) above the Earth's surface, too high for most aircraft and too low for satellites.

To study them, the Taiwanese government built the Republic of China Satellite 2 (Rocsat -2), which includes a sensor built by the University of California at Berkeley, US, to gather information about the lights.

The instrument contributed by the Americans is called Isual - the Imager of Sprites and Upper Atmospheric Lightning. ...

The first Isual image was returned on 4 July. It showed red sprites - short fluorescent "tubes" glowing like neon lights - reaching to the ionosphere.

Another image showed a brilliant lightning flash with a trio of red sprites above it and a sprite halo encircling it. ...

The red sprites are formed in the regions of molecular disintegration [caused by strong local electric fields]. The blue jets, however, seem to come from the top of thunderclouds.

Elves are rapid bursts of light due to electromagnetic pulses from lightning jolts.

After (somewhat reluctantly) concluding the earlier reports were based on actual observations, some scientists have suggested that the flashes may also be the source of many of the UFO sightings airline pilots are rumored to have had.

1) So the US men's basketball team can't get its act together and the US is in the finals for the gold medal in women's soccer. US teams floundering in basketball and up for gold in soccer I mean football? Did I slip through a spacetime warp into a different dimensional reality?

2) Speaking of football, the Iraqi team lost in the semifinals to Paraguay, 3-1, so the dream of the Olympic finals is over. I suppose it doesn't matter much in the scheme of things and they have gone further than anyone had a right to expect, but dammit, it just would have been nice for them to get there.

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is "I Heard It Through the Grapevine?"

JEOPARDY!
TV Commercials for $600

In the '80s, a sleazy salesman named Joe boasted that this car make had "more seats than the Astrodome."

..the waters of the presidential campaign. Well, sort of. Actually, it's more that something came up which prompts both a campaign-related comment and a more general one. I'm sure you've already heard about the something; it's from Sunday's New York Times, referring to planned demonstrations during the Republican national convention:

Republicans said they would seek to turn any disruptions to their advantage, by portraying protests by even independent activists as Democratic-sanctioned displays of disrespect for a sitting president.

That is, they not only intend to lie through their teeth, they're so arrogant about it (or, perhaps more accurately, so confident in the incompetent spinelessness of the media) that they're prepared to announce in advance their intention to lie through their teeth.

First, the campaign-related thought:

The Democrats should be producing an ad to have ready, one that should be relatively quick and cheap to make. It could be a 15-second spot. It would consist of things GOPpers said about Bill Clinton while he was president ("scumbag," "pot-smoking hippie," etc.) fading in and out various places on the screen (perhaps with dates and overlapping voices reading them). After several seconds, they all fade and these words appear (with a voiceover): "And now they want to talk about respect?" Fade to black.

Okay, the more general comment:

Just who the hell do they think they are? Who the hell do they think he is? Just what kind of timid, what brand of rancidly timorous, people do they want Americans to be? Do they think we should be? The president is an elected public official. He's not a king, he's not lord of the manor, he's not some high priest ostensibly exalted by some god or another. Just why can't he be shown some "disrespect?" The rough and tumble of an actual functioning democracy, the actual free expression of a free people, is certain to include numerous demonstrations of "disrespect." If Bush, if any public official, can't abide that, then they'd better get out of public life before their delicate ego gets too much of a beating. Because I say we need more "disrespect," that we've already gone too far along a path of obsequious submission to authority, and it's time to remember that, as I quoted Abbie Hoffman saying a couple of weeks back, democracy is something you do.

And to those who would argue that it's unacceptable to show "disrespect" to the president, I say that you have no understanding of what a democracy, a republic, is about, what free expression, free speech, means and there are a lot of other countries where you would feel more at home, ones where government hoo-hahs don't have to worry about expressions of "disrespect" from the people.

Early in the movie version of "War of the Worlds," the male lead, played by Gene Barry, is in a bunker watching the Martian machines rise out of the pit where they landed. In a voice thick with gleeful astonishment, he says "This is amazing."

I feel the same way about this:

Washington (Los Angeles Times, August 20) — Having failed to find banned weapons in Iraq, the CIA is preparing a final report on its search that will speculate on what the deposed regime's capabilities might have looked like years from now if left unchecked, according to congressional and intelligence officials. ...

The plan to have the report project the potential of Baghdad's weapons programs was disclosed during a classified briefing on Capitol Hill last month by Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, the former military commander of the weapons search group, according to congressional officials familiar with the briefing.

In her Aug. 13 letter, [Rep. Jane] Harman [(D-CA, 36)] said that Dayton had "told staff that the report will focus on what the state of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs would have been in 2006 or 2008 had the United States not gone to war with Iraq in 2003." ...

Other sources familiar with the work of the Iraq Survey Group confirmed the change in direction, saying they had learned of it in recent months even before Dayton discussed it at the congressional briefing.

"We didn't find any weapons, we didn't find any weapons materials, we didn't find any weapons programs, we found only scant indications of weapons research, but BY GOD, SADDAM WAS A THREAT! WE GOT THERE JUST IN TIME! If we hadn't invaded in 2003, in just five years he would have threatened THE VERY FABRIC OF SPACETIME ITSELF!"

Am I being overly cynical to note that this report is apparently scheduled for release just as the presidential race is really heating up?

[S]ome officials familiar with the CIA's plans for the final report said they thought it was politically motivated and designed to focus the public's attention on hypothetical future threats.

Only some?

Footnote: There's just so much good material here. There's Charles Duelfer, who took over for David Kay in January, squeezing more weasel words into one phrase than I would have thought possible, claiming "evidence" that Iraq had "ongoing research suitable for a capability" to produce chemical or biological agents. And there was this:

The U.S. intelligence official said that describing Iraq's future capabilities was "not the focus at all" of the final report and that "the report will not be speculative." But the official declined to say whether such projections would be part of the document, saying he could not comment "on a report that hasn't been completed."

I'm sorry ::scratching head:: but isn't that what you just did?

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is Seoul (South Korea)?

JEOPARDY!
TV Commercials for $200

Claymation California raisins danced to this Marvin Gaye hit.

Tired of hearing about the Demopublicans? Tired of hearing John Kerry and Shrub argue about who's more macho about Iraq? Curious about who else is out there or even just about what moves people, whether fringe or centrist, to run for president?

Project Vote Smart has a list of all the presidential candidates, even those on the ballot in only one state, with - where it has it - some background.

They also have a list of Congressional candidates and another of state-level candidates.

The Congressional list has a big oops: It omits New York. And there is something about the state list which I find dumb: When you first go there and select "State Officials" under "Candidates for Election," you'll be presented with a list of states from which to choose. If you then click on "State Officials" again, expecting to be taken back to the same list for a different selection, you'll get a surprise: It goes directly to the same state you've already chosen. If you want to pick a different state, you have to use the drop down list labeled "Don't Know Your 9-Digit ZIP?" under "Find Your Representative." I think that's dippy, but it's how they do it.

C-SPAN has its own state-by-state list of candidates for federal, state, and local offices here.

...when listening to right-wing media rants:

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.

Even fortune cookies can see through those suckers.

...I was going to say the weather, but that tends to the inadequate: I'm also seeing, hearing, tasting, and smelling under the weather as well. So light doings tonight and maybe tomorrow. We'll see.

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What are scrambled eggs?

FINAL JEOPARDY!
World Capitals

On August 25, 1995, Reverend Sun Moon presided at a wedding ceremony for 35,000 couples at Olympic Stadium in this city.

I was actually going to post this yesterday, but I forgot. But it still deserves posting, so here it is.

On August 5, I made reference to documents showing that the Department for the Security of the Fatherland had obtained from the Census Bureau statistical information on Arab-Americans - but not, apparently, on any other ethnic group. The reason given, which I described as a "lame excuse," was to see at which airports Arabic-language signs should be placed.

The Daily Star (Lebanon) for Thursday had a follow-up.

The US Census Bureau and the US Department of Homeland Security, in response to concerns from an Arab-American group, said Tuesday the US government did not seek the zip codes of people of Arab descent and would not use data collected on Arab-Americans for law-enforcement purposes.

The Arab-American Institute, the most prominent Arab lobby in the US, joined over 40 minority and civil liberties groups in raising "grave concern" that census data on Arab-Americans would be shared with the Department of Homeland Security. ...

In response to the letter, representatives of the Arab American Institute and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee met last Friday with Daniel W. Sutherland, the officer for civil rights and civil liberties at the Department of Homeland Security, and Robert C. Bonner, commissioner of the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection. ...

According to a department statement, the Arab-American Institute conflated two separate policies, one of which sought to create foreign-language signs at airports and the other to collect information on "countries of concern" listed by the US Department of State.

Neither program, the department said, "asked for identification of Arabic speaking people or Arabic ancestry by zip code."

The department also said that US Customs and Border Protection, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, deleted the data and did not "release any of this information to any other agency."

All good, if true, especially the destruction of data part. But, cynic that I am, I still have questions. The denial was, based on the article, limited to saying they didn't break the information down by zip code. Well, how far did they break it down? And in what other ways? And since I still don't understand how this information could be useful in deciding where to put signs at airports, why was it obtained in the first place? Why only on Arab-Americans? Does being an American citizen of Arab descent mark them as being from "a country of concern" and therefore suspicious?

Personally, I don't think all the questions are answered here. But let's suppose for the moment that it was in fact an innocent misunderstanding. I hope at least it will drive home to government types how serious a matter racial profiling is and how much of a threat people perceive it - I say accurately - to be.

Some updates on a couple of places I've been neglecting of late.

- The situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo has turned threatening again.

It started with the brutal massacre of more than 150 Congolese Tutsi refugees in Burundi, fracturing a period of relative quiet. On Thursday, the BBC said

[o]n Wednesday, a meeting of eight regional leaders declared the Burundi Hutu rebel National Liberation Forces (FNL) a "terrorist group" after it admitted responsibility for the massacre.

However, both Rwanda and Burundi say a coalition of anti-Tutsi groups from all three countries [DR Congo being the third] was involved.

The refugees - many of them women, children and babies - were shot or hacked to death with machetes.

In the wake of the massacre, Rwanda and Burundi said they could send troops into DR Congo, the Beeb said on Wednesday.

Both Rwandan and Burundian troops fought in DR Congo's five-year war, which officially ended in 2002, after the death of some three million people.

DR Congo-based Hutu rebels are still fighting Tutsi-dominated armies in both Burundi and Rwanda. ...

Rwanda and Burundi say that armed groups based in DR Congo took part in the massacre, even though the FNL has admitted responsibility.

The presidents of DR Congo and Burundi are holding bilateral talks in an attempt to reduce tensions - but even if they do, a renewed threat has come from another old source.

A Democratic Republic of Congo rebel leader has threatened to resume hostilities if the government does not do more to protect ethnic Tutsis. ...

He told the BBC that the massacre was a "planned genocide" of Congolese Tutsis called the Banyamulenge.

"We cannot wait to be exterminated," he said, speaking from his base near Goma, north of Bukavu.

"We are going to solve it by means of a gun unless the government acts now. We are tired of waiting."

The cycle of revenge and counter-revenge only increases the difficulties facing African leaders as they try to broker a peace deal to end 11 years of strife in Burundi that have seen the deaths of 300,000 people. Tutsis have been the dominant force in Burundi, controlling the government and the army, despite making up only 15% of the population. A proposed deal would guarantee them 40% of the seats in the parliament - but many resist giving up control to the majority, fearing reprisals. I can't imagine that these latest developments will do anything to assuage those fears.

- A trial in Haiti has raised questions about the nature of the new regime installed in the wake of the fall of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Another BBC report, this one from Wednesday:

The former paramilitary leader Louis-Jodel Chamblain has been acquitted of murder at a retrial in Haiti.

Mr Chamblain and his co-defendant, a former police chief Jackson Joanis, were found not guilty by a 12-member jury in a trial that ran from late Monday until early on Tuesday morning. ...

The US state department said it was "deeply concerned".

"We deeply regret the haste with which their cases were brought to retrial, resulting in procedural deficiencies that call into question the integrity of the process," said spokesman Adam Ereli.

A Haitian human rights group told the Associated Press news agency that eight witnesses were called by the prosecution, but only one turned up in court, saying he knew nothing about the case. ...

Human rights group Amnesty International called the trial a "mockery of justice" - saying "false" witnesses had been called to testify and there had been no proper preparation.

It said key witnesses were "in hiding for fear for their lives".

"This is a very sad record in the history of Haiti," it said.

Chamblain, a notorious human rights violator, was one of the murderous thugs who took part in the coup that overthrew Aristide in 1991 and second in command of the new group of thugs that forced Aristide out this spring. His rapid acquittal on his retrial may be a "sad record" causing "deep concern," but it can hardly be considered a surprise.

A month ago, July 16, Salon published a lengthy, excellent article by Max Blumenthal outlining how the US enabled a network of right-wing Republicans with ties to the White House foment anti-Aristide insurrection in Haiti. The results are clear:

To be sure, Aristide was a corrupt, problematic leader - but since his ouster, the situation in Haiti appears to have deteriorated to a point lower than at any moment during his tenure. The looting that followed Aristide's departure has cost Haitian businesses hundreds of millions of dollars; most of the Haitian national police force's weapons and equipment were stolen and over half of its officers quit; and the price of rice, essential to the diet of Haiti's poor, has more than doubled in the last four months. Moreover, recent reports describe rampant human rights abuses and extra-judicial killings filling the power void.

For the majority of Haitians who live on one meal and less than a dollar a day, regime change has only brought more violence, chaos and starvation.

You should read the article or at least the transcript of an interview with Democracy Now! Even if it's too late for Haiti, it won't be the last and forewarned is still forearmed.

- Darfur continues to suffer.

Despite its promises to abide by a July 30 UN Security Council measure in search of a resolution to the crisis, on August 11 the Sudanese government "carried out fresh helicopter gunship attacks in Darfur ... while militia forces attacked refugees," according to a UN account quoted in the Christian Science Monitor's Daily Update, which links to a Toronto Star article.

In a strongly worded statement, the U.N. said that, despite recent pledges, the Sudanese government was hampering humanitarian access to hungry Darfuris by restricting relief flights and causing "major delays" in deployment of aid workers.

"Fresh violence (yesterday) included helicopter gunship bombings by the Sudanese government and Janjaweed attacks in South Darfur. The violence has already led to more displacement," the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a statement.

Khartoum may have been emboldened by an Arab League statement opposing any sanctions on Sudan and calling for "adequate and suitable" time for the government to implement its promises. Which, as near as I can tell, translates to "don't do anything at all; just leave the murdering sons of bitches to their own devices to take their own sweet time about things."

Still, by mid-August a small contingent of 300 troops from the African Union had arrived to protect AU ceasefire monitors; Sudan had earlier rejected a proposal for a force of 2,000 AU peacekeepers, leading some to wonder why, if indeed the situation and the janjaweed militias who are committing most of the atrocities are actually beyond Khartoum's control, as it insists they are, the government would not welcome such a force to help it deal with the crisis. (I recall that there's a Chinese saying that "some questions need only be asked.)

In the meantime, the hunger and the flight of refugees both continue.

The UN is airlifting food to remote communities in Sudan's troubled Darfur region cut off by heavy rains. ...

Our [BBC] correspondent says the population of Beida, like many towns in Darfur, has grown dramatically in recent months.

Thousands of people fleeing the Arab militias have sought refuge there.

Now they are cut off from their villages and their fields and are unable to harvest their crops

as well as being isolated from most aid by wadis filled with rain and turned into rivers that block the roads. Meanwhile, the UN warns that many as 30,000 additional refugees, fleeing from the upsurge in military activity, will cross over into Chad, further straining the already-stressed UN relief operation there, which is trying to provide food and shelter for 180,000 living in desperate conditions in camps there.

Talks sponsored by the African Union are due to begin on Monday in Nigeria, between the Sudanese government and two black African rebel groups it has been fighting in Darfur.

Sudan denies backing the Arab Janjaweed militias and says the rebel groups are responsible for the crisis,

but a new Human Rights Watch report describes the government of Sudan as "hardly a credible actor" in the matter while documenting continuing human rights abuses. The report, titled "Empty Promises? Continuing Abuses in Darfur, Sudan," can be found here.

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What are salt and pepper?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Greasy Spoon Phrase Book for $2000

A request for this style of cooked eggs makes the waitress yell out "Wreck 'em!"

TOMORROW'S FINAL JEOPARDY! CATEGORY
World Capitals

I found it in the Daily Star (Lebanon) for August 12.

Washington (Agence France Press) - The Pentagon has urged Congress to authorize $500 million for building a network of friendly militias around the world to purge terrorists from "ungoverned areas" - and warned Muslim clerics against providing "ideological sanctuary" to radicals.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a key architect of the Iraq war, told the House Armed Services Committee Tuesday the money would be used "for training and equipping local security forces - not just armies - to counter terrorism and insurgencies." ...

No specific beneficiaries of the program were identified, but US officials have repeatedly expressed concern about vast tracts of land along the Afghan-Pakistani border, in Iraq, the Caucasus, Horn of Africa and various islands in the Philippines where radical Islamic fighters could set up shop.

More bluntly put, the Wolfman wants to establish armies of US-funded and directed guerrillas across the world to extend our power into places where the use of our own troops would be ineffective or inadvisable.

In an editorial the next day, the Star said that

[w]e appreciate that strange things happen during an American presidential campaign, but the weirdness meter is bursting through the roof in Washington this week - to judge by the Pentagon's proposal to Congress to provide $500 million to build a network of friendly militias around the world to purge terrorists from "ungoverned areas." ... (Never mind for the moment if Wolfowitz's list of remote, ungovernable regions that offer sanctuary and planning venues for terrorists include places like the suburbs of Newark, New Jersey and Buffalo, New York, or Madrid, Spain; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; or Hamburg, Germany, all of which generated serious terrorist activity).

Of course, just proposing to set up what amounts to a network of mercenaries wasn't enough of a sweeping vision for W-man.

In his testimony, Wolfowitz also suggested expanding the scope of the war on terror by including into the list of its possible targets radical Islamic clerics, who, in his words, provide "ideological sanctuary" to terrorism.

In addition, Wolfowitz called for tightening control over international communication networks, including the internet. ...

"There should be no room in this world for governments that support terrorism, no ungoverned areas where terrorist can operate with impunity, no easy opportunities for terrorists to abuse the freedom of democratic societies, no ideological sanctuary, and no free pass to exploit the technologies of communications to serve terrorist ends," Wolfowitz insisted.

Wolfowitz did not say what additional measures could be taken to prevent terrorists from exploiting freedoms in the US, but pointed out it would involve "difficult decisions."

Actually, I can think of an easy decision: Get him the professional help he so desperately needs.

And if you were wondering what I meant by the headline on this post, it's that unless you were busily checking out some weblogs (and ones beyond Atrios and Daily Kos, too), you were probably unaware of the story.

AP covered the hearings but did not mention Wolfowitz's proposal. Ditto for the Washington Post, Reuters, and the Voice of America. The New York Times articles for that date are now in a for-pay archive, but the headlines and summaries give no hint of a mention.

By comparison, in the course of looking I found coverage of the Wolf's proposal in papers in Pakistan, Malaysia, and Lebanon, most of them relying on the AFP wire story, and while Yahoo! news' regular site had no link to any story, it's Singapore gateway did. In addition, Radio Australia had an interview with an opposition MP in Pakistan partly in response to Wolfotwit's proposal.

Interestingly, those are all south Asia and the Pacific.

But in the US media, as far as I found, bupkis. Apparently it was not considered worth noting.

When I found the Wired article about the ACLU report on the government using private surveillance info, the one I mentioned in the update to this post, I also came across a good interview from May about the issues of privacy-related technology.

Americans are willing to "get naked" for their government if they feel it will make them more secure. That's the conclusion Jeffrey Rosen reached in his new book The Naked Crowd, which explores the willingness of Americans to abandon privacy for perceived security.

The book takes its title from the name Rosen gives a high-tech X-ray machine tested in airports after 9/11. The machine exposes anything concealed beneath clothing, including plastic explosives stored in body cavities. But, as it was originally designed, the machine functions as an electronic strip-search, producing an anatomically correct image of the scanned person's naked body.

A simple programming tweak can make the machine produce non-gendered blobs instead, while still identifying contraband. But Rosen, a George Washington University law professor, found that many people, including his law students, preferred the machine in "naked" mode because they thought it would be more effective, even though they were told that the tweak made no difference in the machine's ability to expose concealed weapons.

I'd urge you to read the whole interview, because here I'm just going to mention two places where I disagree with Rosen.

One is that I think he's too sanguine about CAPPS II. Admittedly, it's latest proposed incarnation, which only proposes to compare an ID to a database to confirm identity is a great improvement over earlier versions which would have delved far more deeply and widely into a person's background. But as Rosen himself notes,

[y]ou might say that it's not a tremendously effective thing to say that people are who they say they are, because most of the 9/11 attackers had valid IDs. Regardless, I'm not as concerned about the privacy implications of a system that's engaging in authentication rather than identification.

But if checking the validity of an ID does not provide any additional security, what's the point of doing it at all? And the second part is just silly: The system was always about authentication, since the identification was what you provided for them to authenticate. What's more, he gives no consideration to the issue of the accuracy of the databases and the associated watch lists, which are notoriously unreliable.

MY other disagreement arises from this exchange:

WN: Should companies be held accountable for not building privacy safeguards into their products? The naked machine, for example, could simply have been built so that it could only operate in "blob" mode.

Rosen: I was told again and again by companies in Silicon Valley, "We only build the machines; it's up to other people to tell us how to design them." I think these technologists felt in good faith that they're not policy makers. Even the decision to refine a naked machine (to become) a blob machine requires some executive to say that privacy is an important value to make that tweak. It's asking a lot of technologists who are instinctively uncomfortable with policy choices.

That's at best disingenuous on their part and naive on his. This attempt to slough off responsibility onto some vague "them" who "told us" how to design the machines, this "we've just helpless victims of others' demands" routine, is laughable. And it's ridiculous to say that they just don't want to "make policy." Of course they're making policy! Yes, the decision to produce "blob machines" involves a policy decision, one that values privacy. But so does the decision to make "naked machines" - it's just that in this case, the policy decision is to value marketability, to say that profit is more important than privacy.

In fact, Rosen later contradicts his own assertion.

I'm very concerned about this military-technological complex. A lot of the post-9/11 policy choices have been driven by the effort on the part of Silicon Valley to market technologies to this burgeoning Homeland Security marketplace. The values of the market are not necessarily the same as the values of the Constitution, and there is indeed a danger that unregulated technologies may threaten constitutional values. [emphasis added]

That is, technologies such as "naked machines" are not the result of policies determined by others, but quite the opposite: The technologies are driving policy and invasions of privacy become policy not because they are determined to be necessary but because they are technologically feasible. By excusing the companies' lack of privacy protection in pursuit of profit and instead putting all the burden on Congress and the courts (which he does elsewhere in the interview), Rosen ignores half the problem.

However, I will give him the last word, as it may be the best comment I've seen on an overriding issue:

It's often not until the misuse (of data) takes place that [people] realize the dangers of surrendering data, and at that point it's too late.

Amen.

Roosevelt's "four freedoms" are found in his State of the Union address, January 6, 1941. On the whole, the speech is rather martial, but I guess that's to be expected considering the times. Even so, these few lines are what have survived and I think they still are worth considering both for the vision they present and for how far short of fulfilling that vision we are still falling.

In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression - everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way - everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants - everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor - anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.

I would add the phrase "or to worship no God at all" (and change "his" to "their") to the second freedom, but beyond that, as an outline, not a bad place to stand even now.

How dare they!

Patras, Greece - Iraqi midfielder Salih Sadir scored a goal here on Wednesday night, setting off a rousing celebration among the 1,500 Iraqi soccer supporters at Pampeloponnisiako Stadium. Though Iraq - the surprise team of the Olympics - would lose to Morocco 2-1, it hardly mattered as the Iraqis won Group D with a 2-1 record and now face Australia in the quarterfinals on Sunday.

Afterward, Sadir had a message for U.S. president George W. Bush, who is using the Iraqi Olympic team in his latest re-election campaign advertisements.

In those spots, the flags of Iraq and Afghanistan appear as a narrator says, "At this Olympics there will be two more free nations - and two fewer terrorist regimes."

"Iraq as a team does not want Mr. Bush to use us for the presidential campaign," Sadir told SI.com through a translator, speaking calmly and directly. "He can find another way to advertise himself."

That from a report by Grant Wahl in Sports Illustrated. Others have amply commented on the fact that, as one put it, "this is how they see us" (emphasis in original). But there's something else here which I find notable: the location of the article. Sports talk tends to be assiduously apolitical, but when it's not, it's usually conspicuously conservative. So the fact that an article containing such explicit complaints about George Bush and US policy appeared in SI may be a sign that at least some segment of the so-called NASCAR dads are waking up. (I know, a lot of caveats.)

Everyone agrees that Iraq's soccer team is one of the Olympics' most remarkable stories. If the Iraqis beat Australia on Saturday - which is entirely possible, given their performance so far - they would reach the semifinals. Three of the four semifinalists will earn medals, a prospect that seemed unthinkable for Iraq before this tournament.

When the Games are over, though, Coach Hamad says, they will have to return home to a place where they fear walking the streets. "The war is not secure," says Hamad, 43. "Many people hate America now. The Americans have lost many people around the world - and that is what is happening in America also."

Gee, I thought freedom from fear was one of Roosevelt's "four freedoms." Maybe Iraq isn't quite as free as we've been lead to believe....

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is coffee?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Greasy Spoon Phrase Book for $1200

In a greasy spoon, these paired seasonings are "Mike and Ike."

The demonization of Hugo Chávez is continuing apace, even after he handily defeated the attempt to recall him.

Wednesday's International Herald Tribune carried a typical example. (It's well to recall that the International Herald Tribune is owned by the New York Times, which has been among the worst offenders in this regard.) It was authored by one Enrique ter Horst, who the Tribune identifies only as "a Venezuelan national, ... a lawyer and political analyst in Caracas." Back in May, however, the San Francisco Chronicle ID'ed him more accurately for the context here as "a lawyer and former diplomat who has joined the anti-Chavez camp." Enrique ter Horst is associated with the anti-Chávez website SixthRepublic.com and his work has appeared on other anti-Chávez sites.

The trouble ter Horst faces is that the laws - the election procedures - and the facts - specifically, the findings of the international observers who checked the results using standard, accepted methodologies - are both against him. Recalling the old lawyer's saying "when the facts are against you, attack the law; when the law is against you, attack the facts; when the facts and the law are both against you, attack opposing counsel," ter Horst inveighs against Chávez.

Parsing like the lawyer he is, ter Horst starts by saying there is a growing "perception" of fraud in the recall count - but by a couple of paragraphs in, he treats it as documented fact without acknowledging the shift.

He then accuses Chávez of resisting the recall because

[h]e was conscious that two-thirds [a figure apparently plucked out of the air] of the people opposed his Cuban-inspired "revolutionary project" and his autocratic, aggressive style

before accusing the electoral council of "tricks and delaying tactics."

He ends with this:

This is not just another election in a country where political actors abide by democratic rules and civilized behavior. It is an election where a choice of society is being made, and where one side is prepared to use any method to remain in power, even elections if it is assured of "winning" them.

In short, his argument is that Chávez is a Castro-style tyrant who everyone dislikes and who therefore could only have won by cheating. But his main argument for his charge of fraud is that the final results were considerably different from the results indicated by exit polls - exit polls done by the opposition and which seemed to focus more on areas where pro-recall, anti-Chávez feeling would be expected to run higher. Not what I'd call persuasive.

Nonetheless, at the suggestion of the observers, an audit is being performed.

[T]he official electoral authority - the Venezuelan National Electoral Council - and international observers from the Carter Center and the Organization of American States (OAS) ... were due to visit 150 randomly chosen polling sites, checking the results produced by voting machines against paper records, in the presence of government and opposition representatives.

No matter: The opposition is refusing to take part, arguing that the touchscreen voting machines themselves and their software have to be checked - even though these machines left a paper trail, the lack of which is generally regarded by activists as presenting the biggest risk of manipulation. Recalling that the opposition has now tried a military coup, two national strikes, and a recall in failed attempts to oust Chávez before his term is up, it really needs to be asked just which side it is that is "prepared to use any method."

Nonetheless, it must be noted that

some opposition figures have begun saying the referendum result should be accepted.

"We have to bite the dust of defeat," Manuel Rosales, governor of Zulia state, was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency.

The head of the country's biggest business association, Fedecameras, has also called for reconciliation between Chavez supporters and opponents.

"These two Venezuelas must reconcile. Venezuela cannot continue in conflict," said Albis Munoz.

Enrique ter Horst is apparently among those who feel continued conflict is preferable to reconciliation.

Labels: Central/South America, foreign policy, international

Updated It gets frustrating sometimes. No matter how much you try to keep up, things slip by. No matter how much you read, you don't know what you need to. And it seems that every lefty website I follow a link to has something that I missed. The site where I found the previous item also had a link to this, which, yes, I missed. It's from today's Washington Post:

The Justice Department is using secret evidence in its ongoing legal battles over secrecy with the American Civil Liberties Union, submitting material to two federal judges that cannot be seen by the public or even the plaintiffs, according to documents released yesterday.

In one of the cases, the government also censored more than a dozen seemingly innocuous passages from court filings on national security grounds, only to be overruled by the judge, according to ACLU documents.

I mentioned one of these cases back on May 5.

You have got to read this. It's a description of a suit the ACLU has filed challenging the constitutionality of National Security Letters which can be obtained without any "individuated suspicion," that is, without any cause to believe the person so targeted has done anything wrong. ...

That is, the case was filed in secret, with the ACLU not even able to reveal its existence, until it could work out a deal with the government about what information about the case could be released.

The name of the client on whose behalf the ACLU is suing is still a secret. And if the government gets its way, not only will the public never know the name of the client, but even the plaintiffs will never know what information the feds used to win their case: suppressing information in order to justify suppressing information.

The use of "secret evidence" is unusual in any case, but particularly in the civil courts, according to legal experts. ...

Instead, prosecutors in national security cases commonly share classified information with defense attorneys on the condition that it cannot be divulged to the public.

"There is no case law that says it's okay to give classified information just to the court" in civil cases, said Ann Beeson, an ACLU attorney. "They should also give it to us under a protective order."

But of course keeping things secret, deals behind closed doors, intoning "trust us" with smarmy smiles to those who will fall for it, snarling "shut up and go away or you'll be sorry" to those who won't, these are hallmarks of the Shrub team's methods, they're SOP. To show you the absurd lengths they'll go to, consider that

[a]mong the phrases originally redacted by the government was a quotation from a 1972 Supreme Court ruling: "The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."

That's right, they tried to have a quote from a Supreme Court decision declared a risk to national security. I'm not sure how they arrived at that conclusion, although I can see how they arrived at the conclusion that it was a risk to their case. There were other things that the public, in government's view, must not be allowed to know for the safety of us all:

Justice officials also excised language describing one of the plaintiffs: "provides clients with email accounts" and "provides clients with the ability to access the Internet." ...

In fiscal 2003, federal agencies decided to classify documents more than 14 million times, a 25 percent increase from the year before, according to the Information Security Oversight Office, which keeps track of classification decisions. At the same time, the total number of pages declassified by the government dropped to its lowest level in at least 10 years, according to the office.

Even Republicans are getting fed up: The article ends by noting that next Tuesday, Rep. Christopher Shays (R-CT) is holding a hearing titled, "Too Many Secrets."

Footnote: On a separate but still related matter, the ACLU is starting a campaign to pressure private companies to refuse to willingly take part in government attempts at surveillance.

Updated to say that the ACLU report on which the campaign is based, titled "The Surveillance-Industrial Complex"," is avilable here and that Wired has a good article based on the report, found here.

Seems someone has leaked a copy of the RNC schedule. Thought you might like to take a peek.

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is Rome?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Greasy Spoon Phrase Book for $400

Whether Arabica or Robusta, order a cup of this and you'll hear "Draw one!"

The on-again off-again truce in Najaf is off again. The recent chronology seems to run like this:

On Tuesday, a delegation from the Iraqi National Conference went to Najaf to meet with Moqtada al-Sadr with a proposal to end the fighting. Under its terms, Sadr's militia would have to leave the Ali Iman mosque and disband in order to be turned into a political movement. In return, they and Sadr would receive amnesty.

Sadr, however, refused to meet the delegation, saying through aides that conditions made it too dangerous, an odd statement for a man who is sworn to martyrdom particularly when it apparently was not too dangerous for the delegation. Still, "cordial" talks were held with lower-level representatives.

Even so, the failure to reach an agreement resulted in the heat being turned up dramatically.

Many delegates said Wednesday they were fed up with al-Sadr, and later in the day, [Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem] Shaalan said the government could raid the shrine within hours.

Now that the peace talks have not worked, "we have to turn to what's stronger and greater in order to teach them a lesson that they won't forget, and to teach others a lesson as well," Shaalan said.

"Today is a day to set this compound free from its imprisonment and its vile occupation," Shaalan said.

He emphasized that only Iraqis would enter the compound. Then, just hours later,

[a] delegate to the national conference[, Safia al-Souhail,] read a letter that she said was "news" from Sadr's office of his "approval of the conditions that the national conference has suggested." ...

Then a member of the Shiite Dawa party, Jalil Shamari, read a statement in front of the full auditorium, saying the "initiative is welcome." Shamari, who said he was contacted by one of Sadr's representatives and told that the cleric had a message for the conference, said that Sadr "accepts the three items that were in the letter of your conference to stop the bloodshed of Iraq, and to build a new Iraq which needs the effort of everyone, its sons and its daughters."

The news drew applause from the assembly. However, there were conditions:

Sheik Hassan al-Athari, an official at al-Sadr's Baghdad office, said the cleric wanted to negotiate how the plan would be implemented and to ensure his militants would not be arrested. He said al-Sadr had other minor conditions, but did not elaborate.

Al-Sadr aide Ahmed al-Shaibany said U.S. forces must first stop attacking.

"They cannot ask us to disarm while ... they're using warplanes to fight us. There should be a cease-fire first and then they ask us to disarm," he said.

It should have been obvious how Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's government and US forces would interpret that: "We agree to your terms. So you stop attacking us and then we'll negotiate." That's pretty much a repeat of the June truce, which they feel got them nowhere and was never actually carried out.

So it wasn't (or shouldn't have been, anyway) a surprise that the interim government found that response inadequate - especially since

[a]nother of [Sadr's] spokesmen, Sheikh Hassan al-Zerkani, told the BBC that the cleric's offer was genuine, but guarantees needed to come from the occupiers, not the occupied.

That is, Sadr's people were not prepared to offer any guarantees. But guarantees are exactly what the government wanted.

The government's demands, according to [cabinet minister Kasim] Daoud, are:

- Mr Sadr must hold a news conference to promise not to resort to future violence and announce the disarming of his Mehdi Army militia
- His fighters must hand in their weapons
- They must vacate Najaf's holy sites

That first demand may be a key one and may prove a sticking point for reasons I'll get into presently. But it's something the government is focused on.

Allawi said Iraqi authorities wanted to hear "directly from al-Sadr himself." On Tuesday, the cleric refused to meet with an eight-person delegation from the National Conference sent to Najaf to try to end to the impasse. He has instead sent letters and issued statements through spokesmen. ...

Allawi said the delegation was ready to go back and talk with al-Sadr if the cleric personally stated he was willing to accept the conditions.

When "we hear from him," the interim government will push ahead in developing a truce and seeing that the demands are carried out, he said.

But he added in a press conference that he was making a "final call for them to disarm, vacate the holy shrine, engage in political work and consider the interests of the homeland."

When asked for a response, Sadr's representatives returned to a militant position. Referring to those demands,

Sheikh Ahmed al-Sheibani, a senior Sadr aide and Mehdi Army commander, told reporters earlier in Najaf: "It is very clear that we reject them."

Sadr himself went further.

Defying that ultimatum, al-Sadr sent a telephone text message vowing to seek "martyrdom or victory," and his jubilant followers inside the shrine danced and chanted. ...

"They are all very proud to be in here and seem to be very adamant about staying in here," CNN reporter Kianne Sadeq said. "They aren't going anywhere until the fighting is over."

(Sadeq was one of a group of reporters who through the cooperation of US forces, Iraqi government forces, and Mahdi militia were able to gain access to the mosque compound.)

A major battle ensued.

Blasts and gunbattles persisted throughout the day Thursday in the streets of Najaf, where militants bombarded a police station with mortar rounds, killing seven police and injuring 35 others. At night, at least 30 explosions shook the Old City as a U.S. plane hit militant targets east of the Imam Ali shrine.

It continued through the night.

U.S. warplanes pounded areas near a shrine early Friday where radical Shi'ite militiamen were holed up....

Suspected U.S. AC-130 gunships struck repeatedly against positions held by Sadr's militiamen, sheltering in and around the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf, Iraq's holiest Shi'ite Muslim shrine.

Orange flashes and white sparks lit the night sky above Najaf....

During this time,

[a]n aide to al-Sadr told the Arabic-language television network Al-Jazeera that the radical Shiite Muslim cleric has asked his supporters to hand over the keys to the shrine to the highest Shiite authorities in Iraq, a gesture symbolically putting the mosque in the hands of religious authorities.

But of course only symbolically. Despite several media accounts of Sadr ordering his militia to quit the mosque, he did no such thing. This was clearly a political move to try to entangle to religious authorities in Najaf in protecting the mosque from an attack. It would seem Sadr is - or at least the people around him are - genuinely concerned about the possibility of an assault by Iraqi forces.

And well they might be. While it's been said that both sides are engaged in brinkmanship, I personally think Allawi is quite prepared to go the iron fist route, even at the risk of the widely-speculated "Shiite uprising." If his government can't stand up to the challenge Sadr presents, it may be lost anyway, so go for broke may well be on the table. Certainly, I can't believe Allawi has any particular scruples against it.

And there's another reason to think Allawi is serious:

The bullet that whistled through the lobby of the Sea Hotel in Najaf yesterday, embedding shards of glass into a foreign reporter's cheek before lodging itself in an air-conditioning unit, carried an unmistakeable message: "Get out." ...

In Najaf journalists were summoned [Sunday] morning by the city's police chief, Ghalab al-Jazeera. It was said that he wanted to parade some captured members of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army, who have launched their second uprising in four months.

Instead the police chief delivered a blunt warning: journalists had two hours to leave Najaf or face arrest.

Most journalists decided to stay, at least initially, but

[a]fter a series of veiled warnings to leave on Sunday, two marked police cars pulled up at dusk outside the Sea of Najaf hotel on the outskirts of town, where Arab and Western journalists are staying. ...

A uniformed lieutenant then told the assembled journalists and hotel staff: "We are going to open fire on this hotel. I'm going to smash it all, kill you all, and I'm going to put four snipers to target anybody who goes out of the hotel. You have brought it upon yourselves."

Attempting to drive journalists out of Najaf, especially coupled with the earlier closing of al-Jazeera, would clearly seem to indicate a desire to limit the spread of information about what is going - or, more importantly, will go - on there. He may want to minimize the risk, but I'm convinced that Allawi believes he can't tolerate the status quo.

Another issue that is or should be of concern to Allawi and the US is the question of Sadr's position and actual degree of authority. I've noted the varying statements, first conciliatory, then radical, then politically astute, then radical again, and so on, and that it seems to me that the closer they can be traced to Sadr himself, the more likely they are to be of the "martyrdom or victory" type. That had lead me to wonder aloud if this actually indicates divisions in the hierarchy of Sadr's movement rather than his being "mercurial," which seems to be the standard wisdom. As a recent example, last week I mentioned that reporters had interviewed a platoon of militiamen from "Khalis, a small Shia town just north of Baghdad, [who] had arrived in Najaf to fight four months ago," that is, in April. They clearly did not leave Najaf and go back to their homes as the June ceasefire required. So does that mean the call for them to leave was a wink-wink affair? Or does Sadr not really have control of his forces? (Sidebar: This is also why the government demand that Sadr hold a press conference renouncing violence may be a real tough nut. To the degree I'm right, to that same degree Sadr becomes the last person in the hierarchy who'd be willing to do that.)

That notion of Sadr as the public face of the movement rather than its keystone is pretty much endorsed by an analysis of the situation in the August 14 Daily Star (Lebanon), which says

[t]he death or capture of Moqtada al-Sadr, who is leading a rebellion against Iraqi and American forces in the holy city of Najaf, may deal a blow to the firebrand Shiite cleric's movement but will not signal its demise, analysts say. ...

Sadr is not indispensable to the Mehdi Army, which comprises thousands of young lightly armed militants from the poorer areas of Iraq.

"If Moqtada Sadr is killed or arrested, it does not necessarily mean the end of his movement or the Mehdi Army," said Nizar Hamzeh, professor of politics at the American University of Beirut. "The makeup of the Mehdi Army suggests that there are other forces behind it, such as the Iranians. Killing or arresting Sadr might put some restraints on the movement or slow its rise, but not necessarily end its militancy." ...

Despite his respected lineage, Sadr is a junior ranking cleric with almost no political experience. His status, however, as a leading Shiite figure, whose popularity matches and in some areas transcends senior clerics such as Ali Sistani, is largely due to his outspoken opposition to the US-led occupation and continued military presence in Iraq.

That sounds much like my description of Sadr as the Iraqi version of "Anybody But Bush" - he's the "Anybody but the Occupiers" leader and if he goes, the movement will survive and another leader will emerge. So it's not Sadr himself that's the issue for Allawi and the US, it's the Mahdi Army.

"The government is adamant about finishing this militant threat," said Saad Jawad, professor of politics at Baghdad University. ...

It is a high-stakes gamble for Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and his US allies who can ill-afford a return to the status quo that existed after Sadr's last insurrection in April. ...

With the security situation continuing to deteriorate, Allawi's government desperately needs a success to show it is capable of imposing law and order.

"The Mehdi Army is the largest armed group in the country," Jawad said. "If the government and Americans succeed in neutralizing it, it will give an impetus for them to do the same in other places."

Are Allawi and the US targeting the militia rather than Sadr personally? Perhaps so, since the would make sense of the fact that

US forces say they have made a major advance into a mainly Shia area in Baghdad that is a stronghold of the radical Iraqi cleric Moqtada Sadr.

Residents of Sadr City told the BBC there was fierce fighting overnight between the Americans and Shia militia. ...

The BBC's Matthew Price, reporting from the outskirts of Sadr City, says the Americans appear to have moved right into the heart of the district in great numbers.

AP adds that "U.S. tanks moved throughout the streets and helicopter gunships shot at al-Sadr militants from the skies" and, Reuters says, "overran the cleric's stronghold ... meeting little resistance, witnesses said. The troops later withdrew to the outskirts of the area." A show of force in Sadr City would seem to have much more to do with pressuring the Mahdi Army than Sadr.

Can the "high-stakes gamble" succeed? Contrary to those who romanticize armed insurrection, my answer is "possibly." It will depend political acumen, a great deal on luck, and even more on the willingness to be exactly what we were supposedly "liberating" Iraqis from: someone who is prepared to be utterly ruthless in suppressing any and all opposition. Personally, I have no doubts Allawi is up for it.

We shouldn't be.

I haven't paid much attention here to the presidential race for reasons I expect should be clear by now, but just in case, a quick recap:

- First, because I've already stated (more than once) my position. I'm not a fan of John Kerry; he wouldn't have been my first (or even my third) choice among the Democrats running in the primaries. I used to be a fan, for example back in the days when as a senator he was conducting a lonely investigation into the connections between the contra thugs the US was supporting in Nicaragua and drug smugglers. But the more he stakes out a foreign policy position that is in a number of ways to the right of George Bush, the less enthused I am. However, as Greg Palast noted, a slap in the face is not as bad as a brick to the head, so if I lived in a swing state, I would swallow my pride and vote for Kerry. I wouldn't be happy about it, but I'd do it.

- Second, because as again I've said several times, I tend to let slide things that are being amply covered by other bloggers, which this campaign most assuredly is, even to the point of largely ignoring what I think are the equally important Congressional races.

Despite that and even though you very likely have already heard about this, I just have to mention it, if briefly:

In newspaper interviews and a best-selling book, Larry Thurlow, who commanded a Navy Swift boat alongside Kerry in Vietnam, has strongly disputed Kerry's claim that the Massachusetts Democrat's boat came under fire during a mission in Viet Cong-controlled territory on March 13, 1969. Kerry won a Bronze Star for his actions that day.

But Thurlow's military records, portions of which were released yesterday to The Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act, contain several references to "enemy small arms and automatic weapons fire" directed at "all units" of the five-boat flotilla. Thurlow won his own Bronze Star that day, and the citation praises him for providing assistance to a damaged Swift boat "despite enemy bullets flying about him."

Thurlow claims he lost his Bronze Star citation more than 20 years ago, which while not unreasonable is still quite convenient. And he still insists there was no shooting during the incident and he got his medal simply for coming to the aid of a boat in the flotilla that hit a mine.

Now, I recall that during Vietnam there were those who claimed medals were too easy to come by. But to accept Thurlow's tale we have to accept that:

- He got a Bronze Star for what amounted to simple assistance, with no risk involved. (Before you start typing mad responses, yes, it is clear that there were mines in the river. But that risk was a constant, that is, it existed for any boat anywhere on the river - so by helping out the one that did hit a mine, he in no way increased the risk to his own boat.)

- And he got his medal without having any clue what the citation said, either then or later. (Aren't citations normally read aloud at the time the medal is given, or is that a misunderstanding on my part?)

Let's just say I don't find Thurlow convincing.

Footnote: As some have noted, the media have slowly, reluctantly, even unwillingly, started to look askance at the Bushites. But I'll believe it means something when and if I see an exchange like this:

Reporter: Mr. President, Senator John McCain has called the ads being run by a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth "reprehensible" and has called on you to specifically denounce them. Why haven't you done so?

Shrub: We have never questioned Senator Kerry's service in Vietnam. [Which is what mouthpiece Scott McClellan always says when the question comes up.]

Reporter: Excuse me, Mr. President, but that's not what I asked you. I didn't ask about what you've said about John Kerry's service. I asked you about this ad. I would appreciate an answer directed to that.

Hell, I'm easy: I'd even be satisfied if reporters consistently said something like the factually-correct "Despite trying to maintain an air of distance, the White House has implicitly endorsed the ad by refusing, despite numerous opportunities, to denounce it."

"Conventional" - with usually means right-wing inspired, media-parroted - wisdom for the last several years has had it that our system of public education is horrible, broken, a failure on all counts, and the only issue to be considered is which method of privatization is going to be the most profitable for private busin - er, for the children.

Vouchers, of course, have a history of repeated failures that drain resources from public schools in favor of largely-unaccountable private institutions that can cherry-pick their students - not to mention their repeated violations of church-state separation - and even then they generally show no statistically significant improvement in student performance.

Still, though, there were the charter schools, the ones that could focus on students, focus on learning and discipline, without having to worry about interfering government bureaucrats and teachers' unions. Surely these examples of educational entrepreneurship would point the way to the future.

Not.

Washington, Aug. 16 (New York Times) - The first national comparison of test scores among children in charter schools and regular public schools shows charter school students often doing worse than comparable students in regular public schools.

The findings, buried in mountains of data the Education Department released without public announcement, dealt a blow to supporters of the charter school movement, including the Bush administration.

Which is likely why they were buried instead of being splashed across the headlines and trumpeted in glossy brochures issued by Education Secretary Rod Paige, the man who back in February described the National Education Association as a "terrorist organization." In fact, more than buried, actively hidden:

The new test scores on charter schools went online last November, along with state-by-state results from the national assessment. Though other results were announced at a news conference, with a report highlighting the findings, federal officials never mentioned that the charter school data were publicly available.

Researchers at the American Federation of Teachers were able to gain access to the scores from the national assessment's Web site only indirectly: by gathering results based on how schools identified themselves in response to a question.

The researchers not only made overall comparisons, they broke down the data by three measures of race and ethnicity (black, white, and Hispanic), two of economic status (eligible or not for school lunches), and three of population density (from urban to rural). That's a total of eight comparisons between charter and public school students in both math and reading: a total of 16 comparisons. In 14 of them, public school students outperformed their charter school counterparts.

The results, of course, did not actually move charter school proponents, who simply spun faster than they had before, when a good number of charter schools were forced to close amid charges of questionable finances and poor performance. For example, despite admitting the charter school students' scores are "dismayingly low," Chester E. Finn Jr., a supporter of charters and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, excused the results on the grounds that the quality of charter schools varies. He insisted the results should be seen as "baseline data." Meanwhile,

[s]upporters of charter schools said the data confirmed earlier research suggesting that charters take on children who were already performing below average. "We're doing so much to help kids that are so much farther behind, and who typically weren't even continuing in school," said Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, in Washington, which represents charter schools. She said the results reflect only "a point in time," and said nothing about the progress of students in charter schools.

But of course the results do not in any way show that charter schools tend to take on struggling students. You can only say that if you assume that charters offer a superior educational experience as compared to public schools - and since that's exactly the point in contention, that's exactly what you can't say.

What we can say is that charter schools have not shown themselves to be an improvement over traditional public education. At the same time, they do function as a means to undermine the principle of community, the notion of a shared responsibility, each to the welfare of the whole and the whole to the welfare of each. They turn education into just another commodity in the marketplace, something else to be bought and sold, another means to enrich some private company skilled at making elaborate claims.

Yes, there are excellent charter schools, usually community-based nonprofit ones. But there are also excellent public schools. If we're not to judge the success or failure of public education only by the best of them, neither can we judge charter schools by the excellence of the handful. They must be judged by the whole - and on that basis and applying their own standard, they have failed.

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is Princeton?

JEOPARDY!
School Days for $1000

Bertolucci and Pirandello gained wisdom at this city's university, known as La Sapienza, "wisdom."

Two more dispatches from the front lines.

- From USA Today for Tuesday:

Global warming could cause dramatically hotter summers and a depleted snow pack in California, leading to a sharp increase in heat-related deaths and jeopardizing the water supply, according to a study released Monday. ...

The researchers used computer models they said illustrate the consequences of doing nothing, or adopting "relatively aggressive" policies such as the greater use of renewable energy sources rather than fossil fuels.

California can avoid the worst effects by quickly cutting how much carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are released into the atmosphere, the scientists said. ...

Under the most optimistic computer model, periods of extreme heat would quadruple in Los Angeles by the end of the century, killing two to three times more people than in heat waves today; the Sierra Nevada snow pack would decline by 30% to 70%; and alpine forests would shrink 50% to 75%.

The most pessimistic model projects five to seven times as many heat-related deaths in Los Angeles, with six to eight times as many heat waves. Snow pack and high altitude forests would shrink up to 90%. ...

Among other predictions, the report says spring melt-off will come earlier, increasing the risk of flooding and decreasing how much snow-melt could be captured in reservoirs. The state will rely more on increasingly scarce groundwater, even as droughts become more frequent and more severe.

- From the BBC for Wednesday:

Europeans must learn how to live with a changing climate as well as seeking to limit its effects by cutting emissions, the European Environment Agency says.

An EEA report, Impacts of Europe's changing climate, says fewer than 50 years remain to act against the threat. ...

The EEA says the climate change under way now probably exceeds all natural climate variation for a thousand years. ...

It says the 2003 heatwave caused melting which reduced the mass of the Alpine glaciers by 10%, and harvests in many southern countries were down by as much as 30%.

The European Union says the world should act to try to prevent temperatures rising more than 2C above their 1990 level, an increase which it regards as the highest sustainable level.

The report says: "On present trends this target is likely to be exceeded around 2050."

The EEA's executive director, Professor Jacqueline McGlade, said: "This report pulls together a wealth of evidence that climate change is already happening and having widespread impacts, many of them with substantial economic costs, on people and ecosystems across Europe.

"Europe has to continue to lead worldwide efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but this report also underlines that strategies are needed, at European, regional, national and local level, to adapt to climate change." ...

"What the report shows is that, if we go on as we are, we have less than 50 years before we encounter conditions which will be uncharted and potentially hazardous."

The report says:

- by 2050, about 75% of the glaciers in the Swiss Alps will probably have disappeared
- at sea, there has been a northward shift of zooplankton species over the last 30 years by up to 1,000 km (625 miles)
- projections suggest annual river discharge will decline strongly in southern and south-eastern Europe, but increase almost everywhere in the north and north-east of the continent
- cases of encephalitis carried by ticks, and associated with a warming climate, increased from 1980 to 1995 in the Baltic region and central Europe, and remain high.

The report says human activities have raised the atmospheric concentration of one of the main greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, to 34% above its pre-industrial level.

To achieve the EU's goal of limiting the temperature rise to 2C by 2100, it says, global greenhouse emissions "need to be reduced substantially".

But it says: "Due to ongoing emissions of greenhouse gases, the observed rise in global temperature is expected to continue and increase during the 21st Century."

The EEA underlines the very long time it would take to slow the rate of climate change, because of the longevity of many gases.

It says: "There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.

"Even if society substantially reduces its emissions of greenhouse gases over the coming decades, the climate system would continue to change over the coming centuries."

In other words, it probably is, as others have warned, too late to avert the damaging effects of our own screwing with the climate. The only question now is how severe that damage will be and how we can minimize it and if possible adapt to the rest.

Footnote, Unintentional Humor Dept.: Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow at the right-wing Competitive Enterprise Institute, called the report on California's future "another piece of climate alarmism."

He and Bonner Cohen, a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research, questioned the reliability of the computer models, and said the report fails to account for human ingenuity and adaptability.

In other words, the study is unreliable because it doesn't adopt the wingnuts' "Don't Worry, Be Happy" school of science and assume the development of some unknown, unforeseen technological means that will magically make everything all right. Maybe it should have also considered the possibility that Elizabeth Montgomery will suddenly emerge from the grave and wrinkle her nose at us.

Labels: global warming

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
Who is Gwyneth Paltrow?

JEOPARDY!
School Days for $600

This Ivy League school gave Bill Bradley his B.A.

The favorite cry of the fantasy-artists who continue to deny the existence of global warming - or, more properly, global climate change - is "Where's the science?" Of course, the science is there and has been for a time now, but that doesn't matter to those who would either out of ignorance or selfishness (or, perhaps, simply the lazy desire to not have to change the way they live for the sake of future generations) persist in calling it a "myth." But as the information comes in and the effects start to show themselves, there must come a point at which even they are forced to acknowledge reality. We can only hope that it's not too late despite the pessimists who say it already is.

So herewith, a few dispatches from the battle lines:

- From New Scientist magazine, June 29:

Rice yields are crashing as a result of global warming at twice the rate predicted by climate modellers, according to the first "real world" experiment on the impact of rising temperatures.

The detailed study of crop yields and temperatures took place on long-standing research plots at the International Rice Research Institute at Los Banos in the Philippines. The results suggest that global rice yields could potentially fall by a catastrophic 50 per cent during this century.

The study found that on the Los Banos plots, "the 0.7°C increase in the mean daily temperature was associated with a rice yield decrease of 10 per cent – substantially greater than previous estimates", says Kenneth Cassman from the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, and one of the research team. ...

Cassman says the IRRI research site is unique because it has grown the same rice varieties and used the same growing techniques for many years, while also collecting detailed temperature records. That means sunlight and temperature are the only variables to explain changing yields.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) currently predicts that without drastic action to halt emissions of greenhouse gases, there will be a rise of 3.6°C in average global temperatures in the coming century. The new findings suggest that could reduce yields of rice - the world’s most widely eaten food - by half.

Some Pollyannas insist that global climate change, associated with increase carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, would actually improve yields by making photosynthesis more efficient.

Cassman agrees that "the increased CO2 concentration should partly offset the negative effects of higher night-time temperatures." But he points out that the Los Banos research plots have been subjected to both higher temperatures and higher CO2 levels, and the negative effects won.

Nonetheless, it is possible that increased atmospheric CO₂ could increase crop yields in the temperate zones. But with those same zones also subject to increased storms and heat waves (see below), that seems at best a vain hope on which to base our future.

- From the BBC for July 12:

Strange things are happening in the North Sea. Cod stocks are slumping faster than over-fishing can account for, and Mediterranean species like red mullet are migrating north.

Several sea birds are also in trouble. Kittiwake numbers are falling fast and guillemots are struggling to breed.

And, earlier this summer, hundreds of fulmar (a relative of the albatross) corpses washed up on the Norfolk coast, having apparently starved to death. ...

Nothing is certain yet, but some believe a dramatic change in North Sea plankton is responsible. And, what is more, they blame global warming.

What's happening is that as temperatures rise, cold water species of plankton are moving out and warm-water species are moving in as the cold water is found further and further north. One result has been a regional decline in a variety of phyto-plankton (tiny plants) that bloom in the early spring. Small animals that depend on that food source are thus dying - as are larger animals that feed on the smaller ones, and so on up the food chain.

In the words of bird expert Sarah Wanless, from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Center for Ecology and Hydrology,

"We speculate these are climate driven changes, which are working their way right through the food chain. And we are seeing signals emerging from the birds.

"In some cases we are finding a whole lot of adult birds dead and in other cases that the birds are abandoning their chicks."

And there might be worse to come. Because sea birds are generally long lived, changes happen rather slowly. So what we are seeing now could be, some fear, the tip of the iceberg.

- From the BBC for July 15:

Since the beginning of the industrial age around 1800, the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has increased from 280 parts per million (ppm) to 380 ppm.

Although it seems a lot, many scientists were surprised: the extra CO2 that turned up in the atmosphere was only about half of the total amount emitted.

Following an international 10-year survey, researchers found the "missing" CO2 - it had been absorbed into the sea.

"The ocean has removed 48% of the CO2 we have released into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels and cement manufacturing," said Christopher Sabine, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) in Seattle, US.

Without that ocean absorption, the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere would have been around 435 ppm, an increase of nearly 15%. That means that some of the effects of climate change due to changes in CO₂ levels, primarily from burning fossil fuels, would have been more severe than what we're already seeing.

That's the good news. The bad news is that while this may have slowed global warming,

[a]ccording to Richard Feely, of Noaa, and his colleagues, that might make life pretty hard for some shell-forming marine animals.

Corals, pteropod molluscs and some plankton (single celled organisms) pull carbonate ions from the seawater to produce their calcium carbonate shells.

But, as the CO2 concentrations in the water increase, the carbonate ion concentrations decrease.

This means the animals lack the materials with which to build their shells.

And in areas where CO2 concentrations are particularly high, Professor Feely's team claim, the animal's shells can actually begin to dissolve.

And don't count on the ocean continuing to rescue us from our own follies. Presently, the ocean holds only about 1/3 of the carbon dioxide it could absorb. But most of the unsaturated water is in the deep layers of water - and the layers mix very slowly: We're talking on the orders of thousands of years. Long before that, the upper layers will be thoroughly saturated with the gaseous products of our technology, not only with the attendant ill effects on certain shellfish (with unknown effects on the higher levels of the food chain) but with the result that subsequently, levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere will rise even faster than they have. Unless, of course, we do something first.

- From the BBC for August 12:

Heat waves in the 21st Century will be more intense, more frequent and longer lasting, US experts report in the journal Science.

Scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) used climate modelling to predict geographic patterns of future heat waves. ...

The research shows greenhouse emissions are likely to exacerbate the problem.

The scientists' models focused on Europe and North America because of the death tolls from severe heat waves in France (15,000 killed last August) and Chicago (over 700 killed in 1995).

Over the coming century, the number of heat waves in Paris was expected to increase by 31% and in Chicago by 25%. In both cities, they would also become more intense. ...

These three-day heat waves showed a rise of more than 3C in minimum night-time temperatures in the Mediterranean region and western and southern US.

The model was also able to show that they would increase in duration

by an average of about 3-4 days in Paris and two days in Chicago.

The evidence keeps mounting, bit by bit, study by study, from rice production in the Philippines to fish stocks in the North Sea, from levels of CO₂ in the ocean to climate models of heat waves. Yet the professional nay-sayers and the paid obfuscators will continue to dance, dodge, and deny because to them, private greed outweighs public good - and besides, as one of them confessed to me in a rare moment of candor, they didn't care about global climate change because by the time it matters, "I'll be dead." And our children and their children, I guess, will just have to fend for themselves.

Labels: global warming

So despite the dire predictions, despite the implied threats, despite the overt hostility from the US,

[i]n a stunning victory, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez easily defeated a recall referendum that sought to end his self-described revolution that has given hope to the poor but has bitterly divided this strategic oil-rich nation.

Electoral officials announced Monday that Chavez received about 58 percent of the vote in Sunday's balloting. ...

As a result of the balloting, Chavez will serve out the remaining two years of his term.

So reported the Chicago Tribune on Tuesday.

Chavez, who had already survived four national strikes and a brief, US-linked coup which the US avoided condemning until after it had failed, has been a bête noire for the Bush administration. He associated with Fidel Castro. He strenuously opposed NAFTA. But what really got the Shrubberies' goat was that he wanted to increase the excise tax on oil produced in Venezuela from 16% to 30% in order to finance programs for the poor and landless.

The central importance of oil, oil interests, and the oligarchs who benefit from them was acknowledged, if only implicitly, in coverage of Chavez's victory. The ellipsis in the quote above contained these sentences:

The decisive victory eased fears of instability on the world oil market, and prices dropped from record highs. Venezuela is the world's fifth-largest oil exporter and supplies about 14 percent of the United States' petroleum needs.

The New York Times, while referring to Venezuela's position as fifth-largest producer in the first paragraph, was slightly more circumspect, waiting until the fifth sentence of its report to say

[h]is victory eased world oil prices, which had been buffeted by concerns that a successful recall, and the ensuing violence that some expected, could disrupt production at the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela.

The concern for the effect on oil prices and the oil industry drove the coverage of the recall - and that concern was undoubtedly behind the active US support for its backers. Greg Palast notes a few of the ways:

Secret contracts were awarded by our Homeland Security spooks to steal official Venezuela voter lists. Cash passed discreetly from the US taxpayer, via the so-called "Endowment for Democracy," to the Chavez-haters running [the] "recall" election.

A brilliant campaign of placing stories about Chavez' supposed unpopularity and "dictatorial" manner seized US news and op-ed pages, ranging from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times.

(It continues even now: In their coverage of the recall vote, the Times called Chavez "a pugnacious leftist populist" and the Tribune made reference to his "signature red beret and class-based rhetoric.")

The presence of such practical endorsements is also undoubtedly behind the refusal of the Chavez opponents to accept their clear defeat.

Opposition leaders rejected the official results after saying their exit polls showed them winning by a wide margin. ...

"We categorically and resoundingly reject these results," said Henry Ramos Allup, a leader of the Democratic Coordinator, the opposition coalition. "The National Electoral Council has committed massive fraud."

However, a team of international observers from the Carter Center and the office of Organization of American States Secretary General Cesar Gaviria said their own investigation supported the official count. Former President Jimmy Carter and Gaviria

explained that the "quick counts" their organizations had conducted at various polling stations coincided with the outcome released by the Electoral Council. The quick counts, used in elections around the world, tally totals from various polling sites, have a margin of error of 1 percent and are more accurate than surveys of voters leaving the polls.

"We have found the information from the quick count was almost exactly the same as that presented" by the electoral authorities, said Mr. Carter, 79, whose organization has monitored elections in 51 counties.

However, it's unlikely things like facts will deter the powerful interests in Venezuela from pushing their claims because, just like their comrades here, truth isn't the issue for them. Power is. And the support of the US for their efforts means there will still be power behind their power. This is a victory for the people, the largely poor, landless people of Venezuela, a place where 77% of the farmland is owned by 3% of the people, where half the farmers together own just 1% of the land and many peasants have none at all. But be assured it is not the end.

Footnote one: One good thing is that the Shrubberies will have something of a difficulty contesting the security of the election and the count: It was done with 20,000 electronic voting machines supplied by Smartmatic of Boca Raton, Florida. Challenging the results means challenging the security and reliability of touchscreen voting, which would be rather awkward for the White House.

Footnote two: For those who would say "just wait until after November," try this:

Throughout his time in office, President Chavez has repeatedly undermined democratic institutions by using extra-legal means, including politically motivated incarcerations, to consolidate power. In fact, his close relationship with Fidel Castro has raised serious questions about his commitment to leading a truly democratic government. - John Kerry, Kerry for President press release, March 19, 2004

"Kerry says Bush is soft on Chávez: John Kerry charges that President Bush's passive approach to backing opponents of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez reflects a larger record of 'sending mixed signals.'" - Headline on Miami Herald article, posted on Kerry for President website, March 23, 2004

That is, Kerry accused Bush of not interfering enough in Venezuela. Anybody But Bush does not equal Always Better Than Bush.

Labels: Central/South America, foreign policy, international, voting issues

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is the Aladdin (Resort and Casino)?

JEOPARDY!
School Days for $200

This Oscar-winning star of "Emma" and "Bounce" wasn't a Spice Girl but a Spence girl, from New York City's Spence School.

The rest are evil.

The Washington Post is running a three-part series on how the WHS* have manipulated and basically hijacked the regulatory process of the federal government for the benefit of their corporate cronies and fat cat friends.

Sunday's was about the methodical way in which OSHA was turned from an agency designed to protect worker safety into one more concerned with corporate profit.

In the past 3 1/2 years, OSHA, the branch of the Labor Department in charge of workers' well-being, has eliminated nearly five times as many pending standards as it has completed. It has not started any major new health or safety rules, setting Bush apart from the previous three presidents, including Ronald Reagan.

Monday's was about the effect of a law slipped into a slipped into a massive appropriations bill in 2000. It's called the Data Quality Act, and it's

a little-known piece of legislation that, under President Bush's Office of Management and Budget, has become a potent tool for companies seeking to beat back regulation.

What it does is require that all reports on scientific matters from all government agencies get cleared through the Office of Management and Budget, putting that one politicized office in the position to prevent the release of any undesired (or undesirable) scientific data and to block regulations based on industry claims that the research doesn't meet standards of "reliability" because it conflicts with the industry's own self-interested numbers.

Tuesday's is to be example of twisting regulations with a little tweak. (The quote is from a sidebar to Monday's article.)

By changing the word "waste" to "fill" in a regulation covering coal mining, Bush appointees have allowed an increase in the destruction of mountaintops in Appalachia.

The pieces are a little longer than we've come to expect from newspapers, but it's good to see some resources devoted to digging below the obvious and the press releases. I'd urge you to read the whole series.

*WHS = White House Sociopaths

Okay, this is getting just way beyond pathetic. I think it was Tom Tomorrow who remarked a while back that satire is dead because the news is producing it faster than you can. This is from AP for August 12:

"Cues from chatter" gathered around the world are raising concerns that terrorists might try to attack the domestic food and drug supply, particularly illegally imported prescription drugs, acting Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Lester M. Crawford says. ...

Crawford said the possibility of such an attack was the most serious of his concerns about the increase in states and municipalities trying to import drugs from Canada to save money.

The FDA is under increasing pressure to allow for the import of prescription medications from Canada, where they can be obtained often for a fraction of what the same drug costs in the US. The agency has made a series of bogus excuses in covering for the pharmaceutical industry, claiming its only concern is the protection of consumers from unsafe, ineffective meds. As part of this the agency consistently calls them "illegally imported" - which, while technically true, still attempts to linguistically tie them to other "illegally imported" substances like, say, heroin or cocaine. But the drugs in question are, of course, prescription medicines legally available in Canada and they are only "illegal" because they've crossed the border, not because they are dangerous to anyone or anything except Big Pharma.

But this is just insane. What are we supposed to imagine here? Perhaps this conversation in Toronto:

"Hmmm, Abdul. This is lot #EE789T."

"Ah, Mohammed! That is one of the lots that is going to be illegally exported to the US! Put our diabolical biological agent in that one!"

I mean, how lame can things get? Pretty lame: Crawford

said he was briefed about the al-Qaida threats uncovered by recent arrests and raids. Asked whether the briefing covered potential terror strikes against products the agency regulates — including food and drugs — Crawford declined further comment.

I'll just be he didn't, especially because

"While we must assume that such a threat exists generally, we have no specific information now about any al-Qaida threats to our food or drug supply," said Brian Roehrkasse, spokesman for the Homeland Security Department.

In other words, there is no actual basis for what Crawford called his "most serious concern." These people are just, just, I don't know, just what is a word for way beyond pathetic?

Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo has a somewhat complex but important tale of the origin of the forged documents linking Iraq to an attempt to purchase uranium ore from Niger.

I'd urge you to follow the link to read the full account, but in essence the story is this:

The documents came into the hands of the US Embassy in Rome through an Italian journalist who had gotten them from an as-yet unnamed "security consultant." That much was pretty well known.

It develops that the "security consultant" had received them in with a bunch of other documents from a source in the Embassy of Niger in Rome. What he didn't know was that his source was also an asset of the Italian military intelligence service known as SISMI. SISMI, it turns out, had instructed their asset to include the forged documents along with real documents she was supplying to the "security consultant."

That is, it appears right now not only that the documents were part of a disinformation campaign by Italian intelligence but that SISMI may well have been the actual source of the forgeries.

If that's true, and right now it appears to be, a good question is why they did it. I'd suggest that one good answer is that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was not shy about his support for Shrub's intent to attack Iraq. Could he have been trying to do Bushleague a favor?

Here's a bigger question: If that's true, whose idea was it?

Feeling unmotivated? We learn from an item reported on August 12 by the BBC that there's hope for you!

Scientists in the United States have found a way of turning lazy monkeys into workaholics using gene therapy.

Usually monkeys work hard only when they know a reward is coming....

Researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health near Washington DC, led by Dr Barry Richmond, have now developed a genetic treatment which changes their work ethic markedly.

"Normal monkeys and people procrastinate - tend not to work very well when they have a lot of time to get the job done, and work better when the reward is nearer in time," Dr Richmond says.

"The monkeys under the influence of the treatment don't procrastinate."

The treatment consists of blocking an important brain chemical - dopamine.

After about 10 weeks it had worn off, and the monkeys were back to their usual unmotivated selves.

Dr Richmond believes treatments based on this concept could one day benefit people with conditions like depression, where motivation has largely disappeared from their lives.

The BBC treated it as an amusing bit, even ending with the obvious joke that

[f]or the rest of us, the day when such treatments fall into the hands of our bosses may be one we would prefer to put off.

But is that really a joke? From Alternative Press Review we hear of an article posted August 8 in the online magazine Intervention that makes it seem less than funny.

Next month, President Bush plans to unveil a broad new mental health plan called the "New Freedom Initiative." ...

The New Freedom Initiative proposes to screen every American, including you, for mental illness. To this end, the president established a New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, to study the nation's mental health delivery service and make a report. It's interesting to note that many on the staff appointed to the Commission have served on the advisory boards of some of the nation's largest drug companies.

The commission reported that "despite their prevalence, mental disorders often go undiagnosed," so it recommended comprehensive mental health screening for "consumers of all ages," including preschool children because "each year, young children are expelled from preschools and childcare facilities for severely disruptive behaviors and emotional disorders."

The commission proposes to start by checking out all 52 million students and the six million adults who work in schools, predicting an additional six million undiagnosed cases of mental illness will be uncovered. And what do we do with them once we've found them?

One recommendation of the commission was that the screening be linked with "treatment and supports," using "specific medications for specific conditions."

In short, a commission whose staff is made up of people connected to drug companies recommends a program to aggressively look for undiagnosed mental illnesses which will then be treated by drugs made by those same companies. Daisy chain, anyone?

And just what connects the two parts of this post? The script is actually easy to imagine.

Investigator (holding clipboard): Well, we've completed the study of your employees and we have evidence of a considerable number of people suffering from depression, as evidenced by their lack of motivation.

Employer (half-smiling, struggling to look deeply concerned): Oh dear, whatever shall we do to help these poor benighted souls?

Investigator (winking): Actually, there is a new gene therapy....

You may find that scenario unlikely, especially in the short term, but if you think it's impossible, you really have not been paying attention.

Remember what I said the other day about how civil liberties (privacy in that case) can be an area where left and right cross? "Take your allies where you find them," I said. With that in mind, this is from an August 10 column by conservative Texas Republican Congressman Ron Paul, on Antiwar.com.

Every generation must resist the temptation to believe that it lives in the most dangerous time in American history. The threat of Islamic terrorism is real, but it is not the greatest danger ever faced by our nation. ...

Liberty is lost through complacency and a subservient mindset. When we accept or even welcome automobile checkpoints, random searches, mandatory identification cards, and paramilitary police in our streets, we have lost a vital part of our American heritage. America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government. Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long.

Speak on, brother.

...by the major media. I missed it, too, but even belatedly it deserves mention. It was forty years ago on August 4, 1964 that it was reported that

[t]he bodies of three civil rights workers missing for six weeks have been found buried in a partially constructed dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation found the three young men - two white and one black man - about six miles from the town in a wooded area near where they were last seen on the night of 21 June.

They were Michael Schwerner, aged 24, Andrew Goodman, 20, both from New York and James Chaney, 22, from Meridian, Mississippi. All were members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) dedicated to non-violent direct action against racial discrimination.

Among those ultimately convicted of involvement in the crime were local Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, Ku Klux Klan leader Sam Bowers, and KKK member Wayne Roberts.

Maybe it would do those of us who are expressing fear about going to NYC for the Republican convention demonstrations to remember how not so very long ago in this country speaking up for justice literally could be, and for some was, at the risk of your life.

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What are ounces?

FINAL JEOPARDY!
Viva Las Vegas!

On August 18, 2000, Barbara Eden crossed her arms and blinked to open this rebuilt hotel-casino.

Back on August 4, I mentioned there had been an effort to require hospitals to gather personal information about undocumented immigrants seeking treatment at emergency rooms. The hospitals would have to do this and submit the data to the Department for the Security of the Fatherland in order to obtain federal reimbursement for the costs of the treatment. The bill, thankfully, had been trounced in the House.

But, repeating a by now familiar pattern, the WHS* simply shrugged and said "Can't make it a law? Who cares, we'll just do it anyway" - trying to gain by regulation what they could not gain by legislation. From the New York Times for August 10:

The federal government is offering $1 billion to hospitals that provide emergency care to undocumented immigrants. But to get the money, hospitals would have to ask patients about their immigration status, a prospect that alarms hospitals and advocates for immigrants. ...

[F]ederal health officials, under guidelines developed in the last couple of weeks, said hospitals had to ask questions about immigration status to make sure the money would be used as Congress intended, for "emergency health services furnished to undocumented aliens."

Hospital executives and immigrant rights groups said the questioning would deter undocumented immigrants from seeking hospital care when they need it, and some hospitals said compliance might cost them more than they would receive in federal aid.

Not only do the feds want hospitals to ask a series of specific, detailed questions about citizenship and immigration status, they want hospital employees to sign forms stating the information was "true and complete" to the best of their knowledge, with civil and criminal penalties for submitting false information to the government. And get this:

Under the new guidelines, photocopies of passports, visas, border crossing cards or other documents that establish the patient's status should, if available, be included in the patient's file.

The feds say that individual data would not "ordinarily" have to be sent to the government, but hospitals have to keep it on file just in case they want to check. Since this is the same administration that has actively sought to intrude into doctor-patient confidentiality in pursuit of those who objected to its asinine anti-abortion laws, I really doubt that is going to be particularly reassuring to either hospitals or patients.

Footnote, Unintentional Humor Dept.: In reply to concerns that such questioning of status could make undocumented immigrants fearful of seeking medical treatment even for their children (who would of course be citizens if born here),

Dr. Mark B. McClellan, administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said hospitals could ask the questions in "an unobtrusive way" that would not discourage immigrants from seeking care.

Exactly how do you "unobtrusively" ask someone if they're on a 72-hour immigrant pass and obtain a photocopy of their "passport, visa, border crossing card or other document that establishes" their status?

*WHS = White House Sociopaths

Nice to have something hopeful for a change. From the Beeb for August 3:

The World Health Organization says it is optimistic that polio can be eradicated globally by the end of 2004.

The claim follows the resumption of vaccination campaigns in parts of northern Nigeria. ...

Between now and the end of the year, the WHO aims to run national immunisation projects in 22 African countries.

Campaigns are also continuing in the other endemic region, South Asia, with the aim of eradicating the virus globally by the end of the year.

Money is a problem; there may not be enough to finish the job without an additional infusion. But the possibility dances before us and my gosh, how can any sane nation not do its part?

(I know, I know, that leaves us out. Maybe not. We'll have to see.)

My computer problems were not as serious as I feared; I should be back in the groove tomorrow. In the meantime, I've time to stick up two items before they get too old.

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is an acre?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Desperate Measures for $2000

There are 192 of these in 12 pounds.

TOMORROW'S FINAL JEOPARDY! CATEGORY
Viva Las Vegas

I've been told by a reader that they tried to post a comment and got a message saying they'd been banned by the webmaster and their comments would not be posted.

Damn.

The problem lies with Haloscan. I had banned a number of IP addresses because of a stalker who was hacking a number of different addresses. To make it easier for me (and harder for him), I banned ranges, not just individual IPs, so he could no longer make use of a particular hacked site.

Unfortunately, in considering that, Haloscan's system makes no distinction about where in your IP the banned range appears. So, for example, I banned all addresses beginning with 212. If you're on AOL, your IP may begin with 172. If by chance your floating IP for a particular session is, say, 172.9.212.45, you will get banned because of the "212" even though it's not at the beginning.

I told them that system is nuts. It seriously undermines the usefulness of banning. But it's the system they have.

So first -

I would very much like to know if anyone else has had this same problem here. I need to know how serious the situation is before I make any decision about changing what I've done.

And second -

If you're tried to post a comment and gotten the "you're banned" message, please, the next time you're online try again. You may well find there is no ban applied to you.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is a barrel?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Desperate Measures for $1200

There are 43,650 square feet in a standard one of these.

I've become aware that for reasons I can't fathom, on some computers this blog displays in text so small that it's barely readable.

Do any of you have trouble reading this? If so, please let me know and I'll have to think about if there's anything I can do on this end to help out.

I'm having computer problems, so I probably won't be around for a day or two. I should be able to get access to another computer long enough each day to post the Jeopardy! answer/question, but I can't count on anything beyond that.

For the moment, since I have about that to do this, I'll just note two things:

- First is the bad news on the social justice front, that is, the decision by the California Supreme Court to invalidate the 4,000 same-sex marriages performed in San Francisco. While not a surprise, it was nonetheless disappointing.

It was in some ways an odd, very narrowly-tailored ruling that limited itself to the question of if San Francisco Mayor Newsom had exceeded his authority by allowing the marriages even though state law defines marriage as one man and one woman. The court openly avoided considering the question of the constitutionality of the law. That still seems odd to me since Newsom's argument was precisely that the state constitution did not allow for the sort of discrimination the law embraced and he was required to follow the higher law. Under those circumstances, to rule that Newsom still had to follow the law is, it seems to me, to elevate the law above the constitution. That's the odd result of the court's conscious choice to dodge a central issue in the case.

On the other hand, the court did say it would be willing to entertain a challenge to the law and suits have already been filed to that end.

- The other is the sort of kinda in a way ceasefire in Najaf. The suspension of fighting is good news but of course not the end of the issue and for the moment at least the US forces are keeping a cordon around the mosque. Supposedly there is one around the cemetary but I don't find that credible due to the sheer size of the place, which is one of the largest cemetaries in the world - if not the largest.

Something I did notice was that in the wake of the report that al-Sadr was wounded, his representatives said they had a "letter" from him urging his supporters to be "wise" and not let their emotions guide their actions. Again, the conciliatory statements, the ones urging calm, come not directly from Sadr but through his office. It may not mean anything but, well, thinking about what I wrote yesterday, I can't help but be suspicious about what's going on behind the scenes.

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is porcelain?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Desperate Measures for $400

It holds thirty-one to forty-two gallons of a liquid ... oil, for example.

There has, naturally, been a lot of coverage of the fighting in Najaf. As I write this, the news is of a "major assault" on the city by US-Iraqi (which as a practical matter means US) forces, including the seizure of Moqtada al-Sadr's house and blocking access to the Imam Ali mosque. A lot of words and cyberink have been expended on the "difficulties" the situation presents to the "new government" of Ayad Allawi and on the "risk" of "inflaming" Shiites if the mosque is damaged. But at least by comparison, precious little attention has been paid to what I think is an equally important question: Why did this happen and what does it mean?

The eruption of violence in Najaf and Sadr City in Baghdad came as more of a surprise to us, that is, the US public, than it should have. Three weeks earlier, on July 15, the Christian Science Monitor reported that

[h]undreds of militiamen loyal to rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr are rearming in their sanctuary in the Shiite holy city of Najaf in possible preparation for a new offensive, say US and Iraqi officials here. ...

"They are preparing for something, gathering weapons; people are coming in buses from other parts of Iraq," says Michael al-Zurufi, the Iraqi security adviser of Najaf Province.

(I actually mentioned this back on July 24 but in a different context, that of the question of possible Iranian involvement in Iraq, a very sore spot for many Iraqis.)

The same article said that

In response, US and Iraqi commanders are fine-tuning contingency plans for possible attacks in the city, while bolstering newly recruited Iraqi police and national guard units with machine guns and rocket propelled grenades.

That is, they were preparing for an outbreak of fighting, which may be why it so quickly became "the most intense fighting in this holy city since the fall of Saddam Hussein." There were suggestions that the decision had been made to try to put the rebels down hard, supposedly the better for long-term security. Present actions would appear to validate those notions, to say the least.

The immediate genesis of the fighting appears a little vague. In addition to the underlying tension drawn from reports of the Mahdi Army rearming itself, there had been some incidents. For example, on August 2 the Daily Telegraph (UK) reported that

American troops have been involved in gun battles with supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr, after they surrounded the rebel cleric's house.

Armoured vehicles were used to help seal off the neighbourhood in the Iraqi city of Najaf where al-Sadr lives, before the US troops, backed by Iraqi security forces, began exchanging fire with the cleric's Mehdi Army.

The violence comes two days after the arrest by multinational forces of Sheikh Mithal al-Hasnawi, a senior lieutenant of al-Sadr in Karbala.

But it appears the proximate cause arose in Basra, where the Daily Star (Lebanon) says Mahdi militiamen

declared holy war against British forces based in Iraq's main southern city of Basra following the arrest of four of their comrades.

Sheikh Saad al-Basri ... accused British forces of arresting the four Sadr supporters in order to "create in Basra, the state of crisis that exists in Najaf."

The forces in Najaf, quite possibly ready, even eager, for a justification to restart the shooting, took the opportunity and attacked a police station. US Marines were called in for help, and the fighting quickly escalated.

The Miami Herald for August 6 says

The accounts given by the Mahdi Army and the Marines about what triggered the day's violence differed.

The Marines said the provincial governor called them in after Mahdi forces stormed a police station in Najaf first at 1 a.m. Thursday, then again two hours later, using AK-47s, RPGs and mortars. ...

Sadr's camp, on the other hand, said the Marines circled the city in the early morning hours, and made a push toward the downtown district. Spokesmen for Sadr said the Marines were carrying through on a recent pattern of hostility....

But I don't find those account in conflict if you note the implied chronology. The militia attacks a police station. The Marines, blaming the militia for the fighting, move in to counterattack. The militia, seeing themselves as having launched an attack on a "symbol of the occupation" but not directly on US forces, figure the US should have observed the "truce" and kept out of it and so the fighting is the US's fault. Rather than conflicting accounts, I see a disturbing asymmetry of perceptions.

The term comes out of strategizing about nuclear war. It means a situation in which each side looks at the same set of facts and responds in a way that seems to them entirely reasonable and rational - but because the sides perceive the facts differently, they interpret them differently, leading to greater conflict.

The classic example of this in nuclear war thinking is the US policy of "counterforce," which argues there is a "ladder of escalation" extending beyond conventional war through "tactical" (i.e., on the battlefield) use of nuclear weapons and then "limited" nuclear war before you get to "strategic" (that is, total) war. The escalation, it's believed, could be stopped at any rung. That made the use of nuclear weapons in a conflict more likely, since the conviction was that use of battlefield nukes did not mean an escalation to strategic nukes. The problem was, at the time the posture was adopted, the Soviet Union, as it was then, maintained there was an absolute firewall between conventional and nuclear weapons and once that wall was breached, the fire would spread uncontrollably. That is, once any nuclear weapons were used anywhere in a conflict, escalation to total war was inevitable.

That is an asymmetry of perceptions and the danger was that in the event of a military confrontation it made the US more likely to do the very things that would lead the USSR to engage in all-out nuclear war.

Here, a similar asymmetry - the militiamen expecting the US would not get directly involved and the US military thinking of course we will - may have produced the final breakdown of the always-tenuous truce. That, of course, is speculation, but I think we have to get past simply recording who shot who and who blew up what and think about the hows and more important whys of what's going on, even if it is speculation or "mere" opinion (so long as its labeled as such). Throw out ideas, see which ones stand up to scrutiny in the light of later developments, the better to understand and predict future ones and chart the best course, the one that affords the most justice for the least harm. (I've already stated my conviction that there is literally no way out of the disaster we have created in Iraq that will not pass through pain and bloodshed, and the first thing we who seek for nonviolent answers and means have to do is admit that. The question is not if there will be more blood spilled, but rather how much of whose - and who will do the spilling.)

I've offered my own thoughts about Moqtada al-Sadr before; in fact, I think my discussions of events surrounding the April insurrection have on the whole held up well. I made a number of comments during that time, but the thread was this: Feeling under threat (his newspaper closed, a chief aide arrested, a old warrant for his arrest being talked up), Sadr lashed out, expecting a more widespread uprising than occurred. Then, realizing he'd gone too far but unwilling (and/or feeling politically unable) to back down, he issued a series of conflicting statements varying between threatening and conciliatory while he tried to feel his way along to some kind of resolution. The early-June truce agreement, while unsatisfying for all involved, was still the best of what was to be had.

From then until he gave a public sermon on July 23, a period of nearly two months, Sadr was rarely seen in public. So rarely, in fact, that there were rumors he had left the country, al-Jazeera reported on July 24.

Why did he virtually disappear at a moment that so many - particularly among the bloggers, it seemed to me - were gloomily describing as his moment of victory, the moment when the US had to back down and back off? Precisely because, I believe, he or at least those around him didn't see it as a victory. Opposition within Najaf was growing, there were reports of what might be termed hit squads who assassinated several of his militia in the city, his resources had been drained, and perhaps most importantly, there had been no wider uprising - instead, he was eventually repudiated by most major Shiite clerics.

That, however, did not move his supporters, who remain passionately committed to him. For one example, on Tuesday the Guardian (UK) described one group of militiamen in Najaf this way:

They were a platoon from Khalis, a small Shia town just north of Baghdad, and had arrived in Najaf to fight four months ago. Several wore green silk headbands, signifying their commitment to "martyrdom".

So passionate are his supporters, in fact, that it can legitimately be asked, as I have before, how much is Sadr leading this movement and how much is it leading him? And while it's still a good question, I may be coming to a different answer than I did in days past. To start with, the July 15 CSM article said

[u]ncertainty remains over whether the militia activity is unified and sanctioned by Sadr or primarily the work of factions of his lieutenants, the officials say.

Some chalk that up to the desire of the US and the interim government to maintain a hands-off posture toward Sadr himself, and if it was the only indication I'd be inclined to agree. But it's not.

For one thing, there was the little matter of the report last month that he had been stabbed as the result of an argument over how far he could go without the approval of his office.

And additional conflicting statements, again varying between threatening and conciliatory, that have come out since the ceasefire continue to indicate a lack of a clear, unified direction.

For example, in June, Sadr's office dismissed the importance of Allawi's decree that militias that would not disband would not be allowed to take part in elections by saying "we are not a militia. We are a popular and radical movement and we are not looking for political posts." But the Guardian noted that

Mr Sadr has refused to take part in Iraq's political process, although he appears to be preparing to contest the elections which are due to be held next January.

For another, referring again to the CSM article:

Posters of Sadr are plastered around the zone, an indication of his popularity, especially among young people. Still, many others live in fear under the shadow of the militia's heavily armed enforcers. ...

Militia men often "arrest" residents and take them before an Islamic court that the government had sought to outlaw. Crimes include "criticizing Moqtada, selling movies and CDs, listening to music," says Michael al-Zurufi. "Even if you only swear at the militia they will arrest you and beat you up with cables and big sticks."

But according to the July 29 Iraqi Press Monitor, al-Mutamar, the daily paper of the Iraqi National Congress reported that

Muqtada al-Sadr has ordered the creation of a committee to deal with removing pictures of him that adversely affect him and his movement. Sadr had been told that some of his supporters had forced people to put his pictures on the buildings and the stores, otherwise they would be punished. He denounced the misbehaviour of some of his supporters, describing them as "spies and malicious". ... He said a committee would be formed to look into the claims of Najaf people offended by his followers.

More recently, in his July 23 sermon, as quoted by al-Jazeera,

al-Sadr denounced the interim prime minister calling him an extension of the occupation.

"Damn him and damn the occupier," al-Sadr told the faithful, who gathered in the grand mosque in Kufa, 150km south of Baghdad.

What's more, in a sermon read on his behalf last Friday, he blamed the US for all violence in Iraq, calling it "our enemy and the enemy of the people," following that up in a press interview on Tuesday by declaring "I am the enemy of America from now until judgment day." AP quoted him as saying

"I will continue fighting," the young, firebrand cleric told reporters in Najaf. "I will remain in Najaf city until the last drop of my blood has been spilled."

Yet the very next day, CNN reports,

he issued a statement ... saying he would welcome help from the United Nations in solving the crisis.

"I have no problem cooperating [with the U.N.]," the statement said. "We hope for this interference during these hard times to help us establish a world of peace and prosperity far away from wars and occupation."

Which is a little odd because back in January, he called the UN "dishonest."

Because of all this, I may be changing my mind about Sadr. I've suggested before that in the April uprising he came to realize that he'd overplayed his hand; I even referred to an old riff about Jesse Jackson: "Another risk any leader runs is generating a tide that can carry you places you're not sure you want to go." But I can't help but notice now that for the most part, the "fight to the death" talk comes from Sadr himself while the more conciliatory statements come from his office or his representatives. Could I have had it backwards? Instead of Sadr realizing he'd overreached could it have been his aides? Instead of Sadr reining in his supporters could it have been that he was the one reined in?

That makes sense to me in part because it would resolve a conflict in my previous thinking. I wrote on April 14 that "Sadr ... is talking like he's preparing for some kind of martyrdom," urging his followers "not to let my killing put an end to their rejection of the occupation." It's a theme he has returned to a number of times, most recently on Wednesday, saying in a statement to his followers "I hope that you keep fighting even if you see me detained or martyred."

Indeed, Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive, notes that the magazine

ran an article in our June issue [not available online] about al-Sadr, and the guy has a serious martyr complex, according to reporter Nir Rosen. Al-Sadr's father and his great uncle both were killed for resisting Saddam Hussein's regime, and al-Sadr wants to become the "third martyr," as he puts it.

Sadr's father was Grand Ayatollah Muhammad al-Sadr,

who was killed in 1999 by agents presumed to be working for then-president Saddam Hussein, thus becoming one of the major symbols of Shi'ite resistance to the former regime.

I did find it somewhat difficult to reconcile the two images: one of a man expecting, even desiring, martyrdom; the other of a man making a cautious political calculation. If, however, it's the people around him who are the cautious ones, who press him to hold back a little, to leave himself a way out, to - if you will - live to fight another day, then things make more sense (or are at least less convoluted).

Still, it's unlikely Sadr's supporters in the streets are concerned with such internal machinations. They are, as has been noted repeatedly, largely young, male, unemployed city-dwellers who feel (with cause) they have been passed over in the reconstruction of Iraq and left to slowly rot. In Sadr they have a voice for their frustration and through him a target for their rage.

Which means, ultimately, the fight against the Mahdi Army is one against men who feel they have nothing to lose led by a man who expects to be martyred. Surrender does not appear to be in the gameplan. As AP reported on Wednesday,

"I think they got a reproduction facility down there. I think they're cloning," Capt. Patrick McFall said, referring to the militant's tenacity in the face of repeated assaults. As he spoke, a mortar exploded nearby, sending up plumes of black smoke. ...

On Tuesday, U.S. helicopter gunships pummeled a multistory building 400 meters (yards) from the shrine with rockets, missiles and 30 mm cannons. The military said about 20 people were killed inside the building.

By Wednesday, more militants had entered the scorched hotel to resume firing at troops.

"We keep pushing south and they just keep coming," said Capt. Patrick McFall, from the 1st Cavalry Division.

So what ultimately happens? Perhaps another ceasefire, but this time I don't see US forces agreeing to withdraw from the city. I will also go out on a thin limb here and say I don't think there will be the "explosion" of Shiite resistance some are predicting as a result of the assault unless it actually results in damage to the mosque itself. The fighting has, obviously, spread to other towns but those are areas where Sadr already had armed supporters. Now, there have indeed been protests. AP's Wednesday report also said

In response to the fighting, thousands of protesters took to the streets in the southern city of Nasiriyah, condemning what they called a U.S. attack on holy sites and chanting slogans against interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.

The demonstrators also pelted the local offices of Allawi's National Accord Party with stones and one broke in and set it on fire.

Nonetheless, I suspect that expressions of outrage on Sadr's behalf are as widespread as they are going to get and will grow only if a threat is perceived to the Shiite religion itself (which an attack on the mosque would likely appear to be) rather than to Sadr or his movement. Admittedly, this is speculation on my part but I'm putting it down here to later be referred to as thoughtful insight or hopefully forgotten as embarrassing nonsense, depending on how events unfold. And I want to emphasize that what I'm saying does not have to do with the extent or depth of opposition to US occupation but with the extent or depth of support for Sadr, my underlying point being that the former far outstrips the latter.

In a way, Sadr is the equivalent of John Kerry. Kerry is the "Anybody But Bush" candidate; Sadr is the "Anybody but the Occupiers" leader. His capture, I maintain, would produce outrage among his supporters but no general insurrection among others. Just as, if Kerry had not won the primaries, whoever did would be enjoying the same passionate support, so Shiites, driven by opposition to US forces rather than devotion to Sadr, doubtless will have others to support if Sadr is in some way removed from the picture.

But if that's true, and I'm convinced it is, the important thing to realize here is that all this just shows what was already obvious: The ultimate source of the present strife is indeed the presence of US and other foreign forces in Iraq.

Removing those forces will not end the violence; there are still many internal conflicts now suppressed by the existence of the common enemy, conflicts which surely will bubble up whenever those troops do finally leave.

But still the bottom line remains: Even if removing the troops will not stop further bloodshed, the bloodshed will not stop until the troops are removed.

Set the damn date and get the hell out.

Labels: Iraq

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is a compass?

JEOPARDY!
Chinese Inventions for $1000

In the T'ang Dynasty, the Chinese came up with this bone-hard, white ceramic also called china.

An issue that was apparently seriously discussed that the Group of 8 meeting on June 10, much to the hopeful surprise of many observers, was 100% debt cancellation for the poorest nations. The reasons had more to do with global politics than humanitarianism and in the end it didn't happen, but the fact that it was discussed at all "changed the 'debt landscape,'" in the words of a statement from the Debt and Development Coalition, and Ireland-based group working on the issue.

Since 1996, the G8 nations (Canada, the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Britain and Russia) have pursued the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). Instead of 100% debt cancellation, the finance ministers agreed to extend the program another two years.

In a nutshell, HIPC was supposed to provide debt relief to countries so deep in the hole that they would never be able to pay what they owed. Within a few years, however, it was a clear failure at aiding the debtors and a clear success at aiding the creditors, the opposite of its advertised - emphasized advertised - intention. This was largely because of the onerous conditions placed on countries in order to get debt relief, particularly the requirement that they adopt an approved "Poverty Reduction Strategy" invariably devoted to open markets, privatization of public functions and utilities, and "macroeconomic stability." Those strategies, like the lowering of tariffs demanded under WTO rules, serve more to deepen poverty and disrupt local economies, leaving the countries every bit as much in hock to banks and creditor nations as before. Which is perhaps not surprising when you realize that the purpose of HIPC is not to relieve debt, but to insure it's repaid to the maximum extent possible.

What raised cancellation this time was not some unexpected outbreak of justice, but the desire of the US to have at least 90% of Iraq's foreign debt forgiven, a proposal transparently intended to aid not the poor of Iraq but the re-election of George Bush. It failed because other nations insisted that a reduction of 50-60% was enough - but what's significant is first that the proposal was made at all and that the IMF supported the idea. Now, the IMF is dominated by the US so its position was no real surprise, but the point here is that intentionally or not, the idea of an almost total forgiveness of debt has been legitimized.

Indeed, more than merely legitimized: According to an April 23 Los Angeles Times press account cited by Jubilee USA,

U.S. Treasury Undersecretary John Taylor said Wednesday that the United States had agreed to write off 100% of the loans it has made directly to nations qualifying for HIPC relief, and was encouraging other big bilateral lenders to do the same.

In the future, Taylor said, wealthy nations should provide more assistance to poor countries in the form of grants, rather than making new loans that perpetuate the cycle of indebtedness. "We shouldn't be providing new loans which we know are going to be forgiven in a very short period of time," Taylor said.

What's more, reports say that at the meeting, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair actually put forth a proposal for 100% debt cancellation for poor nations. If that is true, he deserves much praise. But in any case, the events before and at the meeting prove that calls for complete cancellation of debts owed by countries whose burdens are even more "odious" than those of Iraq can no longer properly be dismissed as "radical" or "not even on the table." Because it is.

Jubilee USA is the American part of an international movement calling for elimination of the onerous debts owed by poor nations, debts that keep them mired in poverty because the resources they could use to improve their conditions are drained away to pay foreign creditors, causing them to need more loans to keep going. Like an unemployed person who borrows on their credit card to pay their bills and then borrows on a second one to make the payments on the first one, they only fall further and further behind until their situation is hopeless. An example Jubilee USA cites is Nigeria, which borrowed $5 billion but has already repaid $16 billion and still - because of the constant need for debt "restructuring" - owes $32 billion. (For a dramatic look at what's often involved in a country getting World Bank/IMF "help," see the chapter on it in Greg Palast's must-read The Best Democracy Money Can Buy or check some of his columns on globalization here.)

The main argument against total debt cancellation is the claim that it would impoverish lending organizations, making future aid to needing countries difficult if not impossible. However, that's not true: A study by the Debt and Development Coalition shows that even without additional funds beyond those already pledged by donor nations, the World Bank and IMF have more than enough resources to dismiss the debts of all nations that qualify for HIPC.

But what's truly bizarre, even criminal, about this is that the bankers don't even know if the programs work. From the July 29 International Herald Tribune:

Wealthy nations and international organizations, including the World Bank, spend more than $55 billion annually to improve the lot of the world's 2.7 billion poor people. Yet they have scant evidence that the myriad projects they finance have made any real difference, many economists say.

That important fact has left some critics of the World Bank, the largest financier of anti-poverty programs in developing countries, dissatisfied, and they have begun throwing down an essential challenge. It is not enough, they say, just to measure how many miles of roads are built, schools constructed or microcredit loans provided.

You must also measure whether those investments actually help poor people live longer, more prosperous lives.

It is a common-sense approach that is harder than it sounds, just like the question it seeks to answer: Does aid really work?

Actually, the real question is not does aid work - by definition, it does, or it's not aid - but are the kind of large-scale, high-tech, local economy-disrupting, free market-advancing projects that are the bread and butter of the World Bank and IMF actually aid? Are projects imposed on communities without their input and regardless of the effects on them because some bankers think it will make the country's GDP rise actually anything that could properly be called "aid?" Are programs that make poor nations even more dependent on high-tech solutions provided by industrialized nations and lending practices that drive those same nations even deeper into poverty anything that anyone could even vaguely, even humorously, call "aid?"

The idea of the Jubilee movement is based on the Biblical notion of the Jubilee Year when debts are forgiven. It's time to wipe the slate clean. Give the billions who struggle for life a chance to breathe.

Footnote: Debt relief, of course, is not enough on its own. There would still be a need for development and humanitarian aid. That same LA Times article refers to a General Accounting Office report in April that found that beyond the costs of debt cancellation,

[t]o reach all the development goals by 2020, poor countries would need to receive $153 billion in development assistance already proposed by the IMF and World Bank plus $215 billion to make up for overly optimistic assumptions in the two institutions' official projections....

That is, $368 billion over the next 16 years, or $23 billion a year. That's a lot of money. In fact, according to the Cost of the War in Iraq ticker over at the bottom of the right column (Hadn't you noticed it?), it's all of 18% of what the war in Iraq has cost us so far.

At the beginning of this month, the World Trade Organization dodged a bullet by coming up with a last-minute face-saving "framework for negotiations" that saved the current round of world trade talks from complete collapse.

Too bad.

According to an August 2 mailing from Global Exchange,

[t]he basic deal which allowed the impasse to be broken was that rich countries have allegedly agreed to slash agricultural subsidies, in a trade off for poor countries lowering their industrial tariffs. However, the timeline and actual numbers of the negotiations are left for further study.

News reports said that negotiators described the 11th hour deal as "historic" but Larry Elliott, economics editor for the Guardian (UK) called that "poppycock."

What happened in Geneva this week was that the trade ministers from 147 countries faced up to the possibility that a fresh failure could scupper the round launched in Doha[, Qatar,] almost three years ago for good. They were prepared to sign up to a framework agreement safe in the knowledge that there will be plenty of chances over the coming weeks, months and probably years to carry on haggling. ...

Nothing significant is likely to happen for six months as a result of the US presidential election and the arrival of a new European commission. An agreement is at least two years away.

Which may well be to the good. Global Exchange says

Aileen Kwa of Focus on the Global South writes, "All in all, the text is a raw deal with the South. It is the makings of a Round that will be catastrophic for the poor." The basic premise of the Doha so-called "Development Round" was that the WTO would finally start to benefit developing countries. This premise has all but been abandoned. ...

What is clear is that the type of agriculture subsidies the rich countries (mostly the US, European Union, and Australia) have agreed to cut will still allow them to prevent many developing-country products from entering their markets. The framework does not sufficiently address the serious problem of dumping - allowing multinational companies to sell food at below-market prices on developing country markets - which is wiping out small farmers and undermining food sovereignty around the world. Real changes in US and EU farm policy are not likely to come until 2006, when these policies come up for revision in the respective governments.

That sentiment is echoed by Elliot, who says

[d]eveloping countries may have left Geneva encouraged that the US and the European Union have promised deep cuts in farm support, but they have little concrete yet to show for their efforts. Brussels and Washington are experts in obfuscation and delay, superb at extracting the maximum political advantage from the smallest of concessions. As Oxfam International noted, there are no cast-iron commitments and no clear timetable. The US says, for example, that it will do something about its subsidies to cotton farmers, but is vague about the what and when.

Meanwhile, as Global Exchange notes,

tariffs on industrial goods has long been an important tool for development to protect local industries and create income for developing states. ... Unfortunately, the tariff cuts in industrial goods the poor countries have agreed to in the framework will chip away at this key development tool, devastating developing economies and starving national governments of needed budget revenue. ... In addition, many natural resources will be opened up for privatization.

As Kevin Watkins, head of research at Oxfam, wrote in the July 29 International Herald Tribune,

[t]here is a Swahili proverb that says, "When elephants fight, the grass gets crushed. When elephants make love, the grass gets crushed."

Which means that, as usual,

secret meetings, bullying of poor countries by the rich, and a massive pressure campaign seem to be the tactics of the day - as the WTO lives up to its moniker of a Medieval institution....

That sentiment, too, is echoed by others. Pascal Lamy, the European Union's outgoing trade commissioner, has called it precisely that. Elliott goes even further:

Despite the mobile phones and the laptops, the way the WTO does business would have been instantly recognisable to the Catholic church of six or seven centuries ago. There is the way the talks are always veiled in secrecy, the way the rituals of negotiation are conducted in a language that few outside the hallowed walls can understand, the way that a small group of influential players hold the fate of the meeting in their hands.

Just as with the medieval popes, however, this is seen as the only way of keeping the show on the road. Europe was divided up into princedoms all of which shared the same faith and owed allegiance to the papacy. Now the world is divided up into princedoms that owe allegiance to free trade. Geneva has its own articles of faith and a court for prosecuting wrongdoers. Its aim, like that of Rome, is to embrace the world.

But while spiritual power rests in Geneva, temporal power resides in the capitals. ... Everybody pays lip-service to free trade just as they once did to Catholicism, but they spend most of the time at war with each other, seeking territorial advantage. The bigger you are, the more influence you wield. ...

The WTO is an institution where the membership acts in flat contradiction to its professed beliefs. It is an institution that encourages the rich and powerful to steamroller aside all opposition, if they can. And it is an institution where efficient policymaking runs smack up against democratic involvement. ...

With 147 members, the organisation can either be fully democratic or it can be efficient: it can't be both.

It's clear which direction the majors - primarily the "Group of 8" major industrialized nations, or G8 - prefer: Making the trains run on time. How efficient.

Footnote: Global Exchange points to one at least temporary victory, and it's not a small one.

Public Citizen notes, "Perhaps the most interesting element of the text is what is not included. After years of developing country and civil society opposition to a proposed broad expansion of WTO scope and powers, the contentious issues of investment, competition and procurement were omitted, and the text on the remaining expansion issue leaves out the degree to which its terms will be binding on WTO nations."

It ain't over 'til it's over. Any maybe not even then. Elliott ends this way:

Developing countries know that the US, Germany and Japan relied on protection rather than free trade in the early stages of industrialisation. They look at the way the west currently behaves with a mixture of envy and contempt. The Catholic church was in a similar position in 1500.

"What happened next," he says, "was the Reformation."

YESTERDAY’S QUESTION
What are kites?

JEOPARDY!
Chinese Inventions for $600

Long before using it at sea, the Chinese had this device with a floating magnetized needle.

Diplomats from Britain, France, and Germany have been trying to convince Iranian officials to honor an earlier deal to suspend its uranium enrichment program. Iran has refused outright, saying it's developing "peaceful" nuclear technology.

Now, according to the Daily Telegraph,

Iran has issued an extraordinary list of demands to Britain and other European countries, telling them to provide advanced nuclear technology, conventional weapons and a security guarantee against nuclear attack by Israel. ...

The EU-3 are still debating over how to respond, but British officials said the Iranian letter was "extremely surprising, given the delicate state of process".

Laughable is what I'd call it. The response should be, "well, uh, no."

On the other hand, it would undoubtedly be helpful to the situation if the US and Israel would stop dropping hints about military assaults or "covert" actions to disrupt Iran's nuclear program or even, in the US's case, "regime change." Or do we get to decide who does and doesn't have nuclear power (the US and Israel both do), who does and doesn't have nuclear weapons (the US and Israel both do), and who does and doesn't have to cooperate with the IAEA (the US and Israel both don't)?

Updated CNN had this on Tuesday:

Lyon, France (AP) - Vandals scrawled anti-Semitic graffiti on dozens of tombstones in Lyon overnight, authorities said Tuesday, the third time a Jewish cemetery has been desecrated this year.

Swastikas and inscriptions with Adolf Hitler's name were painted on headstones in de la Mouche cemetery in this southern French city, the same burial site that was desecrated by skinheads in 1992.

I sometimes try to imagine what must go through the minds of such people, but I always fail. What can they be thinking? I mean that seriously. Do they think this accomplishes something? Do they think it's effective intimidation? Is that even the intent? What is the point? Is it a coward's way of expressing hatred, a way to do it without taking any risks?

Does it make them feel powerful? It's always seemed to me that people who hate ultimately feel powerless, that they feel they have little or no control over their lives and the world around them and wind up attributing that to powerful forces "out there" that are to blame. So is the desecration of a graveyard intended to strike the same chord as desecration of the bodies of the dead? Back on April 8, I wrote

I recall reading a while ago that the existence of funerary practices was one of the things that marked the emergence of a culture, that is, one of the things that defined culture was a means of dealing with death. Most cultures - perhaps all, maybe some anthropologist can confirm that for me - have some tradition of respect for the dead, some rite associated with death. To violate those rites, to violate the dead, then becomes an attack not on the individual person (who is certainly beyond pain and unaware of the event) but on the entire culture of which they were part, branding it as something unworthy of notice or the most basic respect. It's an attack on the very core conceptions on which people's views of themselves and the world around them are built. No wonder, then, that desecration of corpses has been used to taunt enemies throughout history and no greater wonder at the visceral reaction such treatment produces.

What that means is that such things as dragging bodies of the dead through the streets or the meant-to-be-horrifying hanging of charred corpses from a bridge are expressions of power, their intent purely psychological. They can be used by the powerful to demonstrate that power or by the powerless in an attempt to assert power (or at least to feel powerful), but the root impulse is the same.

Is that what's going on here?

Alternately, do they really understand the meaning of what they're doing? Is it just the thrill of getting away with something outrageous? French police blame "some" of the incidents on young Muslims. Let's assume those are based on anti-Jewish hatred born in conflicts in the Middle East. But what of the rest? Certainly the 1992 skinheads weren't Muslim, nor are the skinheads and KKK followers here who've done similar things. I recall a case some years ago where a group of teenagers in the northwest US were caught defacing tombstones with swastikas. When questioned by police, they said they had no idea what the swastikas represented, it was just a symbol. As part of their sentence, they were required to learn about Naziism, the holocaust, the death camps. They were, the poor, deluded, ignorant, benighted children, shaken to their very cores.

But I have a hard time imagining that level of ignorance exists in France, not with all the discussion of anti-Semitism events have generated. (Although I suppose we should not underestimate the ability of humans to be astonishingly uninformed. Just talk to your nearest dittohead or freeper, if you can stomach it.) So we're back to the original question: What thoughts go through the mind of a bigot? I still have no real clue.

Updated to say that I realize my reference to hatred being directed at powerful forces "out there" is oversimplified. I was really meaning it to apply to the situation under consideration. But what does seem to be a common thread in all forms of hatred is a perception of threat, of danger, whether that threat comes from, again, supposed conspiracies among powerful forces (e.g., the "international cabal of Jewish bankers") or the "flooding" of one's culture by "aliens" (Asians, Hispanics, whoever), or somewhere else. Indeed, it's probable that a significant part of the hatred of Americans (and yes, it does exist) is drawn from a sense that a globalized, Americanized culture is overrunning, overwhelming, your own traditional ways.

Before I zoom off into an extended philosophical discussion with myself, dragging your along with me, I'll stop.

The Toronto Star for August 9 reports that for over twenty years, the DuPont corporation has had environmental and health concerns about a chemical used in making teflon. And for over twenty years, DuPont has hidden that information from the Environmental Protection Agency in a vast illegal coverup to allow it to continue raking in the $100 million in profits teflon generates every year.

Now, as a result of a complaint filed by the EPA last week, DuPont faces the possibility of a fine that could reach to $300 million.

Teflon constituents have found their way into rivers, soil, wild animals and humans, according to company, government environmental officials and others. Evidence suggests that some of the materials, known to cause cancer and other problems in animals, may be making people sick. ...

The [EPA] is also investigating whether the suspect chemical, a detergent-like substance called perfluorooctanoic acid, is harmful to human health, and how it has become so pervasive in the environment.

The chemical — which is more commonly known as PFOA or C-8, for the number of carbon atoms in its molecular structure — has turned up in the blood of more than 90 per cent of Americans, according to samples taken from blood banks by the 3M Co. beginning in the mid-1990s.

Note that the issue of whether PFOA is harmful to health is separate from the issue of concealment. The evidence is that DuPont believes the chemical is potentially harmful and in fact knew it to be in the public drinking water around its Parkersburg, WV, plant (where teflon is made) at levels higher than it considered safe. None of this, it seems, was reported to the EPA, which is a violation of federal law. Even if by some remote chance PFOA proved to be innocuous, it would not absolve DuPont of its obligations to have reported its findings of possible harmful effects. Even so,

[s]ome people who live in or near Parkersburg in West Virginia, where DuPont has manufactured Teflon for 50 years, are not waiting for more studies. Thousands of them have joined in a class-action suit filed in the state's Wood County Circuit Court against the chemical maker, which they charge knowingly contaminated the air, land and water around the plant for decades without informing the community. ... The trial is scheduled to begin next month.

Among the documents pried loose by the suit are

several DuPont memorandums from 2000 in which John Bowman, a company lawyer, warned two of his superiors — Thomas Sager, a vice-president and assistant general counsel, and Martha Rees, an associate general counsel — that the company would "spend millions to defend these lawsuits and have the additional threat of punitive damages hanging over our head." ...

"Our story is not a good one," he wrote in one memo. "We continue to increase our emissions into the river despite internal commitments to reduce or eliminate the release of this chemical into the community and environment because of our concern about the biopersistence of this chemical."

Despite that, I have little hope that DuPont will be held in any significant way responsible for a 20-year history of maintaining profits at the expense of others' health. If history is any guide, the EPA will eventually accept a consent decree with a symbolic fine of an amount that DuPont can laugh off - and the poisoned people around its plants will get a hefty jury judgment (prompting pseudo-shocked outcries among the wingnuts about the need for "tort reform") before an appeals court rules that the jury award was "unreasonable" and cuts it to a small fraction of the original amount. DuPont will then launch a PR campaign declaring itself "totally vindicated" and proceed on its merry corporate way while the pundits huff and puff about "frivolous lawsuits" and "junk science" - and others are left to pick up DuPont's mess and suffer the consequences of its profit-driven environmental indifference.

For years, sailors have told stories of monster waves that could swamp even the biggest ships, huge walls of water that rose up out of calm seas. Another is the wonderful anthology of tall tales of the sea, fiction to entertain and amuse.

Except this isn't fiction. The BBC for July 22 reported that

[t]he shady phenomenon of freak waves as tall as 10 storey buildings had finally been proved, the European Space Agency (Esa) said on Wednesday. ...

As part of a project called MaxWave - which was set up to test the rumours - two Esa satellites surveyed the oceans.

During a three week period they detected 10 giant waves, all of which were over 25m (81ft) high.

Over the last two decades more than 200 super-carriers - cargo ships over 200m [over 650 feet] long - have been lost at sea. Eyewitness reports suggest many were sunk by high and violent walls of water that rose up out of calm seas.

But for years these tales of towering beasts were written off as fantasy; and many marine scientists clung to statistical models stating monstrous deviations from the normal sea state occur once every 1,000 years.

"Two large ships sink every week on average," said Wolfgang Rosenthal, of the GKSS Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany. "But the cause is never studied to the same detail as an air crash. It simply gets put down to 'bad weather'."

But the ESA survey revealed 10 massive waves, some almost 100 feet (30 meters) high.

"The waves exist in higher numbers than anyone expected," said Dr Rosenthal.

Now that we know for sure they exist, the next thing for scientists to do is figure out why they happen. Right now they think they know some of the causes. ESA's release on the story, found here, says that

[s]o far some patterns have already been found. Rogue waves are often associated with sites where ordinary waves encounter ocean currents and eddies. The strength of the current concentrates the wave energy, forming larger waves – [principal investigator Susanne] Lehner compares it to an optical lens, concentrating energy in a small area.

But some is not all and a better understanding will lead to more safety for shipping.

More questions about touchscreen voting. According to the Miami Herald for August 5, it now emerges that more than 18 months ago, Florida officials, the same ones who loudly proclaim their faith in the machines and accuse opponents of being partisan fearmongers, were made aware of a suspicious difference in reported "undervotes" between districts using touchscreen systems and those using optical scanners. In the latter system, voters mark paper ballots and feed them into an optical scanner.

An "undervote" is when a voter does not cast a ballot for a particular office.

Touchscreen voting machines are supposed to warn voters about undervotes to give them a chance to rectify the error if it is one. (The voter may have decided not to cast a ballot for that office or on that question.) Optical scanners to that only if there is more than one office or question on the ballot. That would appear to give reason to believe that undervotes should be rarer with touchscreen equipment than with scanners. Despite that,

[i]n January 2003, state election officials reported that there was a higher rate of so-called undervotes among voters using the ATM-style equipment than those voters who mark paper ballots and feed them into an optical scanner.

At the time, the Florida Division of Elections compiled a detailed report that looked at how each county's voting equipment performed during the 2002 general election....

The undervote rate for the 52 counties that used optical scanners was 0.33 percent of all votes cast, compared to 0.92 percent for the 15 counties that use touch-screen machines.

That is, although the undervote rate for touchscreen machines should be lower than for scanners, it was nearly three times higher. And the pattern of computers reporting more undervotes than scanners apparently continued in the March 2004 presidential primary.

State officials dismiss the reports, noting that undervotes were at an all-time low and saying the computer account of them was less than 1%. But in the 2002 general election, a little over 5 million votes were cast for governor. One percent of that is 50,000 votes - or nearly 100 times the official margin of Bush over Gore in 2000.

Footnote: The Herald quotes Indian River Supervisor of Elections Kay Clem as downplaying the report.

She pointed out that the 2002 election was the first time that many voters first saw the machines. She predicted that as voters become more comfortable with touch-screen voting, the amount of undervotes will decline.

"It was the first time that many of these people have used this equipment," Clem said. "I think we will see a dramatic improvement in undervotes as we go through more elections."

Great. In 2000, problems in black precincts were attributed to the unfamiliarity with voting of many first-time registrants. In other words, we were told they were too dumb to figure it out. Not wanting to be discriminatory, apparently, Florida officials want to expand that judgment to all voters.

Labels: Constitutional rights, voting issues

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is the "Enola Gay?"

JEOPARDY!
Chinese Inventions for $200

During the Han Dynasty, over 2,000 years ago, the Chinese were out flying these.

It's the other 59th anniversary.

A good time to ask outselves why we keep acting like the issue and the threat no longer exist.

From the same New York Times article as the preceding post:

Seattle, Aug. 4 (AP) - Gay couples can marry under Washington law, a judge ruled Wednesday, saying there was no evidence that same-sex marriages threatened children in nontraditional families.

Ruling in favor of a challenge to the law restricting marriage to one man and one woman, the judge, William L. Downing of King County Superior Court, also wrote that barring same-sex marriages served no "state interest" and violated the constitutional right of gay couples to due process.

And as a note of consolation to the good people of Missouri - I use the word "good" deliberately - even though a constitutional amendment is clearly harder to reverse than legislation, it can be done. And just how recently would it have been that getting 30% or even 40% opposition to such a measure would have seemed an impossible dream?

Remember the story of the man hammering at the stone.

To the delight of reactionaries everywhere, Missouri voters overwhelmingly approved a measure for an amendment to the state constitution to ban gay marriage, reported the New York Times on August 5.

The 70% vote in favor of the proposal was 10 percentage points more then expected, likely driven by a turnout of 41%, a sharp increase over the 15-25% that's usual for a primary election. Those numbers had the mouth-breathers drooling and in their excitement they revealed the real purpose here:

"What this has done is brought the people of faith to the table like I have never seen before," said Phil Burress, chairman of the Ohio Campaign to Protect Marriage, the group leading Ohio's effort to amend its Constitution. "This is what the Democrats biggest fear was - that something would energize the people of faith. And it has."

Leaving aside the usual slop that Democrats are opposed to "people of faith" - and leaving aside as well the notion that the bigoted bullshit of such as Phil Burress represents the views of all people of faith - the statement effectively admits that the purpose here is to use hot button, emotion-laden issues to manipulate a socially conservative base into voting against its own political and economic interests.

Nearly 1.5 million people voted, a fact that Vicky Hartzler, spokeswoman for the Coalition to Protect Marriage in Missouri, attributed to grass-roots efforts, including notes in church bulletins, neighbors holding up signs along busy thoroughfares and preachers talking to their congregations. [Emphasis added.]

Isn't there something about tax-exempt organizations like churches not being allowed to specifically advocate for or against particular legislation? Or am I remembering that wrong? And if I'm not, does anyone think it would really be investigated?

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is Venezuela?

FINAL JEOPARDY!
Aviation

Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tibbets commanded this bomber over Japan in August 1945.

Updated I was going to do this as an update to yesterday's post on privacy that pointed to some recent examples of increasing government secrecy, but I decided this made the point so perfectly it deserved to stand on its own.

On August 5, AP reported that

[c]iting a need to keep information from terrorists, regulators said Wednesday the government will no longer reveal security gaps discovered at nuclear power plants or the subsequent enforcement actions taken against plant operators. ...

Until now, the NRC has provided regular public updates on vulnerabilities its inspectors found at the country's 103 nuclear power reactors, such as broken fences or weaknesses in training programs.

"We need to blacken some of our processes so that our adversaries won't have that information," said Roy Zimmerman, director of the commission's Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response, which was created after the attacks.

NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said commissioners voted to take the step March 29, but kept it quiet as agency staff worked to implement the plan.

So in other words they took a secret vote to create more secrecy and kept the vote secret until they were ready for the additional secrecy.

The kicker is that according to David Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists, information on such gaps is not revealed until after it has been corrected - which means it is useless to anyone planning an attack or sabotage. "It's all ancient history."

So what does this new policy accomplish? Keeping information about the sloppy security at high-value targets from the public.

It's not so much "don't ask, don't tell," it's more of "we don't tell so you don't know to ask."

Updated to cite Lochbaum as the source of the statement that problems aren't revealed until after they've been corrected. No link as the quote comes from a local paper and the online story is only available to paid subscribers to the print edition.

The headline on an August 7 New York Times article about the anemic job growth figures for July:

In Blow to Bush, Only 32,000 Jobs Created in July

Is the effect on George Bush's political future rather than on the lives of those struggling to care for themselves and their families really the issue here?

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is a swimsuit? (Acceptable: bathing suit)

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Beauty Pageantry for $2000

Women representing this South American country have won five Miss World titles.

TOMORROW'S FINAL JEOPARDY! CATEGORY
Aviation

From the Boston Globe for July 28:

London - A British civil liberties group Wednesday named a U.S. program to fingerprint foreign visitors as the year's most menacing project.

The so-called U.S.-VISIT program took the dubious honor at the Big Brother Awards, presented by London-based watchdog Privacy International to individuals and organizations "that have done the most to invade personal privacy in Britain."

The group said it took the unusual step of giving the award to a U.S. initiative because the "offensive and invasive" plan "has been undertaken with little or no debate or scrutiny."

Starting in September, most foreign nationals will be required to be fingerprinted and photographed before entering the United States. ...

The Big Brother Awards - named in honor of the ominous, all-seeing ruler in George Orwell's "1984" - are presented annually in more than a dozen countries. ...

The winners weren't expected to attend the ceremony to receive their trophies, in the shape of a golden boot stamping on a human head.

Gee, why not? Some winners of the Ig-nobels come to get theirs.

Privacy. How long before it's an alien concept, a quaint reminder of "simpler" times? I'm sure a lot of us recall the descriptions in 1984 of the cameras in every room, watching people all the time - or at least reminding them that they might be being watched, they never knew. Now such cameras, while not (yet) in our homes, surround us. We are recorded at the bank, tracked in the supermarket, scanned as we pass by corporate offices, scrutinized at government facilities. We are observed, measured, tabulated, indexed, and filed.

All the while being told the audacious lie that it's for our own benefit. No, it's not for our benefit at all. So following over these few days, several items about some aspect of privacy. Who has it and who doesn't.

As I've expressed over the past few days, what privacy we have left is seriously threatened by aggressive intrusions from both corporations and government and there are consequences, both financial and political, that arise from that. Still, it needs to be said that the news isn't all bad. There is resistance and the have been some successes.

For one big example, a couple of weeks ago

[t]he U.S. Department of Homeland Security bowed to pressure from civil libertarians, airlines, the travel industry and other nations in deciding to ditch CAPPSII, an air passenger surveillance program that would have given each traveller a green-yellow-red rating based on their perceived security threat.

That from the July 16 Toronto Star. The same day, the Washington Post added that

USA Today broke the story on Wednesday. The paper cited Homeland Security Department chief Tom Ridge, who, when asked "whether the program could be considered dead, Ridge jokingly gestured as if he were driving a stake through its heart and said 'Yes.'"

But of course the program was not actually canceled outright; that would have been too much to hope for. Instead, it has been postponed for "reshaping and repackaging." It will likely follow the same track as TIA - the Total Information Awareness program, which in the wake of vociferous complaints became the Terrorism Information Awareness program, with a revised mandate and more limited reach.

Originally, CAPPS II was going to examine a wide variety of private, commercial databases to "sweep in data on credit, home ownership, telephone records and car registration as a way to evaluate whether the name given by a passenger was real," as the Post story quotes the New York Times as saying. (USA Today adds "mail-order shopping lists" to that list.) Under the revamped program, it appears at the moment,

"the government will simply confirm a passenger's identity by, for example, asking to see a valid driver's license and then checking its authenticity with a commercial data service. Then an airline agent would match that name against increasingly robust watch lists of known terrorists,"

in the words of unnamed sources cited by the Post. USA Today notes that such a review "would be much smaller in scope than the proposal in CAPPS II," even as it's an expansion of the current system.

Privacy advocates, not surprisingly, were cautiously pleased by the announcement, and the people the Post story quoted point up something I've noticed for some time: The issue of privacy is one where the left and the right cross and combine in odd ways. The Post quotes people from the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Democracy and Technology - and former Congressman Bob Barr, a reactionary Republican out of Georgia. Barr authored the infamous Defense of Marriage Act, was regarded as the most homophobic member of Congress (which is saying something), and was a driving force in the Clinton impeachment, during which he apparently lied about his experience as a US Attorney to give weight to specious legal arguments. In 1998 he slipped a provision into an omnibus appropriations bill barring the District of Columbia - over which Congress has jurisdiction - from counting the votes in a referendum approving of medical marijuana. A year later, a successful suit allowed the count to take place; the referendum passed by 69-31. So Barr got approval for a provision banning its implementation.

And yet, and yet - in 2001, he testified before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure in support of efforts to limit the use of surveillance cameras in public areas. Of the CAPPS II announcement, he said

he would be "'sleeping with one eye open' to ensure the program is not resurrected. 'You can never be absolutely certain that a proposal like this is dead. You can shoot it, stab it, cut its head off, drive a stake through its heart, burn it, scatter the ashes – and still it might pop up somewhere else."

And let's not forget that one of leading opponents of the intrusive sections of the TRAITOR Act is Rep. "Butch" Otter, conservative Republican of Idaho. Take your allies where you find them.

One last note now on CAPPS II: The ACLU reminds us that

[t]ransportation Security Administration told the Senate Government Affairs Committee that the TSA has collected passenger information from Delta Air Lines, Continental Airlines, America West Airlines, Frontier Airlines, and the Galileo and Sabre reservation systems and that previously it had been disclosed that personal data regarding passengers had been obtained by the Federal Government from Northwest and Jet Blue Airlines.

The group has written to Tom Ridge calling for a commitment to prove they really do intend to limit invasions of privacy by destroying all those records.

Meanwhile, another program to sweep up our lives into government databases seems to be sputtering out before it got going. Back in February, Jane Black, Business Week's correspondent on privacy issues, wrote

On Jan. 29, Utah pulled out of MATRIX, the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, a database that allows law-enforcement officials to comb through information on individuals held by the state and commercial establishments. Utahans evidently were enraged to discover that the police could create dossiers that include a person's birth and marriage certificates, car registration, and address and credit history - with one click of a button.

MATRIX is a system designed by Florida-based Seisint, Inc., in the wake of 9/11 and marketed to state law enforcement agencies. It can quickly sift through literally billions of pieces of information to answer queries. The New Standard, an online news service headquartered in Syracuse, NY, reported in early July that

Matrix contains an unprecedented amount of information: current and past addresses and phone numbers, arrest records, real estate information, photographs of neighbors and business associates, car make, model and color, marriage and divorce records, voter registration records, hunting and fishing licenses, and more.

For example, a user could identify all brown-haired divorced male residents of Minneapolis who drive a red Toyota Camry and are registered to vote. The data can then be displayed in "social networking charts," showing connections between individuals, photo line-ups and "target maps," according to internal Seisint documents obtained by The New Standard after a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Sixteen states have done a preliminary screening of the system; thirteen signed up for it. By the time of Black's column, after Utah dropped out, only six remained: Florida, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, and Michigan.

On Jan. 30, Georgia withdrew amidst a swirl of privacy concerns. Last September, California's attorney general declared that the system "offends fundamental rights of privacy."

Since then, New York has also quit the system and Michigan is being sued by the ACLU to end its participation because interstate transmission of police files violates state law.

And the faltering system is being revamped to "adopt a decentralized model in which each state maintain its own records" - which would seem to be a rejection of the underlying principle of the original project.

Black, back in February, may have put her finger on the important point here.

The real furor over MATRIX demonstrates something much more important - and surprising: Privacy advocates have gained a lot of ground in the two years since September 11. And the pendulum is swinging back in their favor.

Hopefully, that will continue to swing our way.

Footnote: Just like everything else, this is not all good news. For one thing, the five remaining states at least at present look like they intend to ignore public concerns and stay with the program. And even though they are the only ones participating, Matrix

has driver’s license information from 15 states, motor vehicle registration from 12 states, Department of Corrections information from 33 states and sexual offender information from 27 states, according to Seisint documents,

and it continues to use that information.

Finally, the Washington Post reported on July 15 that

[i]nformation giant LexisNexis Group said yesterday it will pay $775 million in cash for Seisint Inc., a privately held data service that created a controversial tool called the Matrix, which gave state and federal authorities new power to analyze records about Americans after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. ...

LexisNexis maintains billions of records, including media reports, legal documents and public records collected from thousands of sources. It has some 13,000 employees around the world. Officials there believe the deal will boost the company's already extensive role in homeland security initiatives and expand the information and analytical services it already provides under contract to police departments across the country and federal agencies such as the Justice Department and the CIA.

Civil liberties activists warned that the combination of Seisint technology and LexisNexis's global reach could be massively intrusive if used in the wrong way. "It will hurtle us even faster toward a surveillance society," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. "It can't be good news here."

Willox said such fears are overblown because of the care his company takes to ensure that individual privacy is not abused. "LexisNexis has a long history and is well respected for going the extra mile to protect personal privacy," Willox said. "This or any acquisition is not going to change that."

Yeah, well, I remember the saying from negotiations on international arms treaties: "Trust, but verify." They want the trust but want to be immune from the verification. And I say that makes them inherently untrustworthy.

Labels: Constitutional rights, corporations, loss of freedom, privacy

CNN for August 6 had this gem.

A drop in so-called "chatter" among suspected terrorists is troubling some counterterrorism officials, who noticed a reduction in intercepted communications before the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, government sources said.

Diminished communication prompted the concern because the counterterror experts don't know why suspected terrorists would be talking less. But they noted that similar reductions have happened several other times during the past few years.

So after a couple of years of being warned about the looming dangers indicated by an increase in chatter, we're now supposed to be looking under our beds for terrorists because of a decrease in chatter, which is worrisome because the same thing happened just before 9/11! even though it's also happened several other times when nothing occurred.

Good grief. This is just getting silly.

I've come to the conclusion that the whole lot of them are clueless ninnies who, like TV news pundits, are more concerned with looking like they know what they're doing than actually knowing. That is, except for those who manipulate the intelligence for their own political ends.

I suspect that if and when another major terrorist attack occurs - and I accept the fact that it might - these boobs will be caught as flatfooted that time as they were the last, discovering only well after the fact that they had much more information pointing to the event than they realized but because their own narrow vision - their own serious lack of imagination - kept them focused on the implications of past targets and methods rather than future ones, they just didn't see it.

I think a better approach would be to gather a group of about two dozen randomly-chosen people - I mean it, just choose them randomly off the street - and sit them down for a couple of hours over pizza and beer to toss around the question "If you were a terrorist group, what do you think you'd do, what action would you take, to hurt the US?" Don't even define "hurt," let them develop their own variants on it. I bet you'd get more imaginative insight into possibilities than have appeared in all the official briefing papers over the last three years.

And a hell of a lot less political exploitation of fear.

Footnote: The same article noted that the information about one of the financial targets that mussed so many official hairlines the other day actually came from before 9/11. The pictures of the Prudential Center in Newark, NJ, had to have been taken before then

because they did not contain surveillance cameras installed on the building's exterior after September 11, 2001....

[Company representative Bob] DeFillippo also said most of the photos appeared to have been taken from a book on the company's history that was published in 2001.

So did the dimwits at the Department of the Security of the Fatherland not even think to do a basic check such as, you know, actually asking the companies about the pictures before splashing the "threat" all over the media? Or did they simply not care?

Incompetence or duplicity. I'm not sure which is worse.

It's the 59th anniversary.

In the words of the Christian Science Monitor for August 2, "it's time to worry about the economy again." (Although why they said "again" mystifies me.)

Consumers are balking about pulling out their wallets, particularly to buy new cars. Paychecks for low-wage workers are not keeping up with inflation.

And the price of crude oil has spiked up yet again to a new record high of $43.85 a barrel. Call it "Shock at the Pump: The Sequel." ...

The impetus for the new economic worries came last Friday when the Commerce Department reported the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) grew at a 3 percent annual pace, a number that economists considered to be disappointingly soft. The first quarter was revised upward to 4.5 percent, making the drop-off look even sharper. ...

Yet some economists also think the economy has already started to accelerate. By some estimates the second half of the year will see the economy buzzing along at as much as 4.5 percent annualized growth. The optimists believe business spending and a return of the consumer will drive the economy.

The first indication of whether that's true will come on Friday, when the Labor Department issues the July employment report. The consensus is that the economy added about 200,000 jobs last month. If job growth is considerably weaker, many economists will start to ratchet down their estimates for the second half of the year.

Well, guess what.

Washington (AP, August 6) - America's payrolls grew by an anemic 32,000 new jobs in July, suggesting the economy is stuck in summer lethargy three months before voters elect a president. The report rattled Wall Street and sent stocks tumbling.

The latest snapshot on employment growth, in a report Friday by the Labor Department, showed the smallest gain in hiring since December. Job gains reported earlier for May and June also were lowered.

Predictions had been for job growth of between 215,000 and 247,000 in July.

"The economy has come close to a standstill this summer," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com. "I think businesses' collective psyche is still quite fragile," he said, citing high energy prices, the possibility of terrorism and the Iraq war. ...

The 32,000 net jobs added in July followed a gain of just 78,000 jobs in June. May's payrolls also were lowered to show an increase of 208,000. The new figures for May and June translated into a combined 61,000 fewer jobs being created in those two months than previously estimated.

And the struggles, as we all know, are not just recent.

New York (CNN/Money, July 29) - Americans' overall income shrank for two consecutive years after stocks plunged in 2000, the first time that has effectively happened since the current tax system was put in place during World War II, according to a published report Thursday.

The New York Times, reporting data from the Internal Revenue Service, said gross income reported to the agency fell 5.1 percent to $6.0 trillion in 2002, the most recent year for which data is available, down from $6.35 trillion in 2000. Because of population growth, average income fell even more, by 5.7 percent, and adjusted for inflation the decline was 9.2 percent.

The paper said the decline was due to a combination of the big fall in the stock market and the loss of jobs and wages in well-paying industries as the recession started in 2001.

The biggest hit was taken by the richest among us, those with incomes of $10 million or more, whose average income fell 22% over the period.

Admittedly, I do find it hard to work up a lot of sympathy for the travails of someone whose income dropped from $10 million to a mere how-will-we-afford-the-groceries $7.8 million. What I find more worth noting is that

the average income of those filing returns with incomes between $25,000 and $500,000 saw the average income little changed, somewhere between a 0.1 percent decline and a 0.2 percent gain, depending upon the income category, the Times said.

Aside from the fact that that's one heck of a range (the top end being 20 times the low end), it still means that those of us in this very broadly-defined middle got nowhere in those two years. Add in inflation, and we lost ground. And frankly, we can afford to lose ground one hell of a lot less than those making more than $10 million a year.

On the other hand, some of us are still doing quite well. According to the International Herald Tribune for July 29,

[t]he median pay for a chief executive officer in the United States rose 15 percent in 2003 and was up 22 percent among top executives at larger companies, according to a survey released Wednesday. ...

Despite some calls for restraint in pay, it was a better year for the executives than 2002, when the median total compensation rose 9.5 percent. ...

The survey also examined the pay of 1,794 chief executives who held their posts for all of 2003 and found that median compensation was $1.85 million.

With consummate understatement, the report said that "it would appear that any chance of reining in executive compensation has disappeared."

While we get nowhere.

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
Who are married women?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Beauty Pageantry for $1200

In 1947, Barbara Walker was the last Miss America to be crowned wearing one of these.

Privacy. How long before it's an alien concept, a quaint reminder of "simpler" times? I'm sure a lot of us recall the descriptions in 1984 of the cameras in every room, watching people all the time - or at least reminding them that they might be being watched, they never knew. Now such cameras, while not (yet) in our homes, surround us. We are recorded at the bank, tracked in the supermarket, scanned as we pass by corporate offices, scrutinized at government facilities. We are observed, measured, tabulated, indexed, and filed.

All the while being told the audacious lie that it's for our own benefit. No, it's not for our benefit at all. So following over these few days, several items about some aspect of privacy. Who has it and who doesn't.

Increasingly, we don't. But if we don't have it, who does? Whose privacy, whose right to keep secrets, is being aggressively defended?

Duh.

Of course, this particular White House administration has been notorious for stonewalling requests for information even from members of Congress. That, I'm sure, comes as no news to anyone here. Instead of that, then, Here are a few accounts of the lesser ways information vanishes these days.

Washington (AP, July 7) - Bush administration officials broke no laws in withholding from Congress estimates of the cost of the new Medicare law, says an internal investigation made public Tuesday.

The Health and Human Services Department inspector general, the agency's internal watchdog, said its three-month investigation found that administration officials used aggressive tactics to keep from Congress its much higher estimates of the legislation's cost - $100 billion more than the president and other officials were acknowledging.

Yet the effort - including threats by Thomas Scully, the administration's Medicare chief until December, to fire chief Medicare actuary Richard Foster - did not violate federal law, the inspector general said.

Scully, the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, "has the final authority to determine the flow of information to Congress," the unsigned report said.

The matter arose when it came out that Foster's estimates were considerably higher than those the White House used in lobbying for its Medicare deform package - estimates that would have doomed the legislation, which barely survived conservative complaints about cost as it was. And indeed, when the White House released its budget proposals in January, it gave the 10-year cost as $534 billion. That's $139 billion, or more than a third, higher than the estimate it gave to Congress originally.

Foster's estimates, written during consideration of the bill, still have yet to be made public or turned over to congressional Democrats who have requested them.

In March, Thompson promised to release them and said the inspector general's investigation would clear the air. ...

But since then, he has refused to release the documents in question. House Democrats have sued for the documents in federal court and The Associated Press, which sought the same materials under the Freedom of Information Act, has appealed the withholding of 149 pages out of 162 pages that the agency acknowledges are responsive to its request.

Instead of releasing the information, the White House has once again investigated itself and once again - surprise! - found itself not guilty. It's just fine for the White House to actively hide necessary information, threaten people who could release it, lie about what they know, and then just refuse to release the data even after the fact.

And it doesn't matter even if the information is already out there: the Shrubberies will just take it back. This statement, found at Buzzflash, was released by Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association on July 30:

Last week, the American Library Association learned that the Department of Justice asked the Government Printing Office Superintendent of Documents to instruct depository libraries to destroy five publications the Department has deemed not "appropriate for external use." The Department of Justice has called for these five these public documents, two of which are texts of federal statutes, to be removed from depository libraries and destroyed, making their content available only to those with access to a law office or law library.

The topics addressed in the named documents include information on how citizens can retrieve items that may have been confiscated by the government during an investigation. The documents to be removed and destroyed include: Civil and Criminal Forfeiture Procedure; Select Criminal Forfeiture Forms; Select Federal Asset Forfeiture Statutes; Asset forfeiture and money laundering resource directory; and Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 (CAFRA).

ALA has submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the withdrawn materials in order to obtain an official response from the Department of Justice regarding this unusual action, and why the Department has requested that documents that have been available to the public for as long as four years be removed from depository library collections. ALA is committed to ensuring that public documents remain available to the public and will do its best to bring about a satisfactory resolution of this matter.

And if withdrawing and destroying public documents won't work, there's always the other course.

Even the phrase suggests a sort of cognitive dissonance: retroactive classification. Come again? ...

As a long-time, staunch defender of the administration's efforts to improve the nation's defenses against terrorism, as well as an ardent defender of the First Amendment, we at The Republic find ourselves uniquely positioned to say, emphatically and without qualification, that Mr. Ashcroft, this time you truly have gone too far.

The case being considered in that editorial from the July 9 Arizona Republic is that of Sibel Edmonds, about who I've posted before. She is a former FBI translator who made headlines when she went public with charges that she was fired due to her complaints about shoddy and inadequate work in the program, including mistranslated and untranslated documents and allowing politics to control the translation of intelligence.

She sued the government on the grounds that she was dismissed for being a whistle-blower. In response, the government invoked a "state secrets" privilege with the desired result.

Washington (AP, July 6) - A federal judge threw out a lawsuit Tuesday by a whistle-blower who alleged security lapses in the FBI's translator program, ruling that her claims might expose government secrets that could damage national security.

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton said he was satisfied with claims by Attorney General John Ashcroft and a senior FBI official that the civil lawsuit by Sibel Edmonds could expose intelligence-gathering methods and disrupt diplomatic relations with foreign governments. ...

Edmonds said the judge dismissed her lawsuit without hearing evidence from her lawyers, although the government's lawyers met with Walton at least twice privately. She noted that Walton, the judge, was appointed by President Bush.

In a touch of unintended hilarity, the judge laid down as a serious statement what we all used to use as a joke.

The judge said he couldn't explain further because his explanation itself would expose sensitive secrets.

"I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you." Ha ha.

Not only did the government block the suit, it prevented her from testifying in a case brought by 9/11 families and it "retroactively classified" both the testimony Edmonds gave to Congress in 2002 and letters from Senators Pat Leahy and Chuck Grassley to the Justice Department and FBI about Edmonds' testimony - letters which apparently got no response. When the DOJ's own inspector general did a report on the Edmonds case, that got classified as well.

(The letters from Leahy and Grassley can still be found here at The Memory Hole; Grassley's to FBI Director Robert Mueller on October 28, 2002, includes the transcript of Edmonds' appearance on "60 Minutes" the day before.)

Still, a bit of truth slipped out, as the July 29 New York Times reported.

A classified Justice Department investigation has concluded that a former F.B.I. translator at the center of a growing controversy was dismissed in part because she accused the bureau of ineptitude, and it found that the F.B.I. did not aggressively investigate her claims of espionage against a co-worker.

The Justice Department's inspector general concluded that the allegations by the translator, Sibel Edmonds, "were at least a contributing factor in why the F.B.I. terminated her services," and the F.B.I. is considering disciplinary action against some employees as a result, Robert S. Mueller III, director of the bureau, said in a letter last week to lawmakers. ...

The letter did not say what other factors, if any, beyond Ms. Edmonds's accusations may have played a part in the decision to dismiss her. In the past, federal officials have suggested that her allegations had nothing to do with her dismissal, pointing instead to what they described as her "disruptive" presence in the field office.

I'll just bet, especially since

[a]n official with knowledge of the report who spoke on condition of anonymity said investigators confirmed some of Ms. Edmonds's allegations about translation problems to be true, but could not corroborate others because of a lack of evidence. None of her accusations were disproved, the official said.

People making accurate complaints of incompetence are as a general rule "disruptive."

This, too, was not without its moment of levity. In his letter, Mueller

said the F.B.I. would work with the inspector general to determine whether any employees should be disciplined as a result. And he emphasized that he wanted to encourage all F.B.I. employees to "raise good faith concerns about mismanagement or misconduct" without fear of reprisals or intimidation.

Except, of course, for being branded "disruptive," fired, blocked from any means of redress, and having a report largely supporting your contentions classified. Other than that, no worries.

Oh, but this only happens in areas affecting national security, yes?

Well, I suppose - provided you define "national security" widely enough.

Washington (CNN, July 10) - One day after she was fired, former U.S. Park Police Chief Teresa Chambers accused the Bush administration Saturday of silencing dissenting views in the rank and file. ...

Chambers said that she didn't expect to be fired seven months after the Interior Department put her on administrative leave with pay for talking with reporters and congressional staffers about budget woes on the 620-officer force.

She was fired Friday, just two and half hours after her attorneys filed a demand for immediate reinstatement through the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent agency that ensures federal employees are protected from management abuses. ...

"The American people should be afraid of this kind of silencing of professionals in any field," she said. "We should be very concerned as American citizens that people who are experts in their field either can't speak up, or, as we're seeing now in the parks service, won't speak up."

National Park Service officials said Chambers broke rules barring public comment about budget discussions and prohibiting lobbying by someone in her position.

Chambers said she did nothing wrong except argue for adequate funding for the Park Police, which falls under NPS authority - and perhaps fail to understand that she was required to "toe the party line."

It's estimated that the NPS operates on about 2/3 of the budget it needs to maintain and protect national parks, including so-called "icon" sites such as the Statue of Liberty.

This, too, has its bitter humor:

According to the Coalition of Concerned National Park Service Retirees, a group of more than 250 former NPS officials, the Interior Department sent out memos to park superintendents to make further reductions - and "to mislead the news media and public about the service cuts in order to avoid ... 'public controversy.'" ...

The memo argues against discussing the situation with the media, then adds that "if you feel you must inform the public through a press release," refer to "service level adjustments" rather than "cuts."

No, you're not fired. Nor are you "riffed" or "on indefinite layoff." No, you're merely a participant in a service level adjustment. But don't tell anyone: Your employment has been retroactively classified.

According to a commentary in the July 29 Daily Star (Lebanon), a

public opinion poll in six Arab countries ... showed a sharp and continuing slide in America's standing among Arab citizens. ...

In Saudi Arabia, for example, a naturally conservative society that very easily adopts many aspects of American lifestyles and technology, the approval rating of the US in the period 2002-2004 dropped from 12 percent to 4 percent. In Egypt the drop was from 15 to 2 percent, and in Jordan from 34 to 15 percent. ...

The evidence continues to pour in, week after week, poll after poll: the five pillars of US policy in the Middle East are all seen by the Arab people of this region to be unfair and imbalanced, favoring Israel and autocratic Arab leaderships, and harming the sentiments and interests of ordinary Arabs who otherwise embrace most aspects of American life and values. The five pillars that all generate powerful anti-American sentiments are the Arab-Israeli conflict, the regime change and occupation of Iraq as part of the "war on terror," calls for reform, support for non-democratic regimes, and threats against other countries or parties in the region for their alleged WMD plans.

I said it in a letter to friend dated October 19, 2001:

So much we could have done differently, so much we could do differently. And none of it is happening. It's really, really depressing.

It still is. Is it due to ignorance? To the arrogance of power? To deception and deceit in pursuit of imperial aims?

Yes, I think so.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the leading photographers of the 20th century, whose concept of the "decisive moment" when all elements of a scene fall into place has inspired generations of photographers, died Monday at age 95.

"In whatever one does, there must be a relationship between the eye and the heart," he once said in a rare interview. "With the one eye that is closed, one looks within, with the other eye that is open, one looks without."

A selection of his photographs can be found here.

Updated Privacy. How long before it's an alien concept, a quaint reminder of "simpler" times? I'm sure a lot of us recall the descriptions in 1984 of the cameras in every room, watching people all the time - or at least reminding them that they might be being watched, they never knew. Now such cameras, while not (yet) in our homes, surround us. We are recorded at the bank, tracked in the supermarket, scanned as we pass by corporate offices, scrutinized at government facilities. We are observed, measured, tabulated, indexed, and filed.

All the while being told the audacious lie that it's for our own benefit. No, it's not for our benefit at all. So over these few days, several items about some aspect of privacy. Who has it and who doesn't.

On Tuesday, I noted some evidence that corporate America holds that its interest in profit outweighs our interest in privacy. Today, just a few reminders that even less are we supposed to have privacy in the face of the desires of government America.

Of course, the wholesale, court-approved violations of the 4th Amendment during the DNC should be enough evidence of the government's point of view, but if that's excused on the grounds of "special circumstances," the declared intention of the Boston police to continue "random" suspicionless searches just on general principles should serve in its stead.

And then there is always the TRAITOR Act, which allows unprecedented secret government intrusions into our lives. There are those who are trying to limit the worst of its excesses, but in this area even having the votes is not enough.

Washington (AP, July 8) - The Republican-led House bowed to a White House veto threat Thursday and stood by the USA Patriot Act, defeating an effort to block the part of the anti-terrorism law that helps the government investigate people's reading habits.

The effort to defy Bush and bridle the law's powers lost by 210-210, with a majority needed to prevail. The amendment appeared on its way to victory as the roll call's normal 15-minute time limit expired, but GOP leaders kept the vote open for 23 more minutes as they persuaded about 10 Republicans who initially supported the provision to change their votes.

"Shame, shame, shame," Democrats chanted as the minutes passed and votes were switched. The tactic was reminiscent of last year's House passage of the Medicare overhaul measure, when GOP leaders held the vote open for an extra three hours until they got the votes they needed.

"You win some, and some get stolen," Rep. C.L. Butch Otter, R-Idaho, a sponsor of the defeated provision and one of Congress' more conservative members, told a reporter.

The provision would have undone a section of the law that lets authorities get special court orders requiring book dealers, libraries and others to surrender records such as purchases and Internet sites visited on a library computer while at the same time barring those institutions and stores from letting customers know their records have been accessed. The warrants are issued under intelligence rules, which do not require evidence of illegal activity and thus are much easier to obtain than traditional search warrants, which is of course why the White House wants it this way.

Last July, Otter succeeded in getting the House to block so-called "sneak and peek" searches but the provision was dumped in conference. He tried again this year but got ruled out of order.

The real reason for this devotion to the Act surely can't be any demonstrable successes in fighting terrorism.

"Regarding civil liberties, the 9/11 Commission report essentially says that the Justice Department and White House have not made a compelling case for either the administration’s obsession with secrecy or its Patriot Act," said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU Executive Director [in a press release on July 22]. "This bipartisan report should serve as a wake-up call for Congress that it must maintain the sunsets in the Patriot Act."

As the report states on page 394, "The burden of proof for retaining a particular governmental power should be on the executive, to explain (a) that the power actually materially enhances security and (b) that there is adequate supervision of the executive’s use of the powers to ensure protection of civil liberties. If the power is granted, there must be adequate guidelines and oversight to properly confine its use." ...

Notably, the commission does not recommend that any sunseted provisions should be made permanent.

Some of us knew that all along. I wrote the following to my Senators on October 14, 2001:

"I believe there are more instances of abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation." - James Madison, 1778

As I'm sure you're aware, in addition to some completely noncontroversial commonsense actions the version of the so-called "Anti-terrorism" act recently passed by the Senate contains several provisions that raise concerns about civil liberties. Sifting through all the pronouncements leading up to the final vote (I do not use the term "debate" because it was much too one-sided and much too rushed to deserve the description) I find nothing in those provisions that leads me to believe that had the bill been in force earlier that the events of September 11 would not have happened. That is, not one such provision has been able to withstand the simple question "Would this have made any difference?"

The fact is, in the weeks since September 11, it's become clear that as a security matter, the attacks didn't happen because of a lack of police powers or security provisions but because of a failure to use those that already existed. Adding more such powers, more authority to invade our privacy, restrict our freedoms, track our movements, more ability to substitute suspicion for proof - all while reducing judicial oversight - only creates more opportunities for official abuse. Despite the hypnotic mantra about "improving our security while protecting our liberties" this bill is nothing more than one of Madison's "gradual encroachments."

(I've quoted a passage from this letter I think twice before, the more recent occasion being July 23.)

If not effective protection or prevention, then what's the point? Fishing expeditions. Probing. Watching. The drive to control dissent by being able to "watch" enough to at least make people think they're being watched all the time by reminding some that they have been. From the Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO) for July 24:

Law enforcement officers visited several Denver young people Thursday to warn them against committing violence at the Democratic and Republican national conventions.

"This is part of an ongoing FBI investigation with the Joint Terrorism Task Force," Colorado FBI spokeswoman Monique Kelson said Friday. "That's all that we can comment right now." ...

Mark Silverstein, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Colorado, said young people living at two locations in Denver reported the visits to the ACLU and that similar visits have occurred elsewhere in the United States in recent days.

He said officers told the Denver young people that they were visiting "protesters and anarchists."

"It's an abuse of power, designed to intimidate these kids from exercising their constitutional right to protest government policies and associate with others who want to protest government policies," Silverstein said.

It's almost become a cliche that it's unlikely that there is anyone who does not harbor some secret that they would not wish to be broadcast to the world. It may not be criminal, just embarrassing, but it's still something we desire to keep to ourselves. As Billy Joel put it in "The Stranger,"

Well, we all have a face that we hide away forever
And we take them out and show ourselves when everyone has gone.

It's also a truism that the more someone knows about you, the more they can find out. The greater the ability of the government to examine who we are, where we work, who we associate with, what we read, what we buy, our credit and medical histories (we're back to the issue of social security numbers again), the list grows continuously, it seems, the more we may feel - or actively be - intimidated into keeping our unpopular or dissenting opinions to ourselves for fear of the consequences of doing otherwise.

Naturally, such watching is not limited to, and may not even be primarily on, individuals. Tracking ethnic groups is pretty much a snap. Dateline, July 30, the Electronic Privacy Information Center:

EPIC has obtained documents revealing that the Census Bureau provided the Department of Homeland Security statistical data on people who identified themselves on the 2000 census as being of Arab ancestry. The special tabulations were prepared specifically for the law enforcement agency. There is no indication that the Department of Homeland Security requested similar information about any other ethnic groups. The tabulations apparently include information about United States citizens, as well as individuals of Arab descent whose families have lived in the United States for generations.

When questioned, the Department of the Security of the Fatherland gave the Census Bureau the lame excuse that it was trying to decide what languages should be included on signs at international airports. The tiny facts that 1)this ethnic data is useless to that end since it's reasonable to assume that most of these people speak American English and 2)if determining in what languages signs at airports should be really is their intent what they should be curious about is how many non-English-speaking Arabs fly into the US seem to have escaped their pointed little heads.

Even outside of events with such obvious political overtones, Madison's gradual encroachments show themselves, pecking away at privacy.

Washington, Aug 3 (Reuters) - U.S. regulators should make auto manufacturers equip all new vehicles with data recorders to give authorities better information when they probe accidents, safety investigators recommended on Tuesday.

Yes, of course. It's always in the service of "better government" and "public benefit." It's for our own good that our cars should be fitted with devices that keep track of what we do as we drive. Devices that can be used to prosecute us in the event of an accident. Devices that many of us already have in our cars and don't even know it.

Privacy advocate David Sobel said millions of drivers on the road now have no idea that their vehicles are collecting data[, CNN reported on Wednesday].

"They certainly don't know what's being collected, how long it's being retained and who can get access to it under what circumstances," said Sobel, general counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center. ...

The highway safety agency says between 65 percent and 90 percent of 2004 vehicles have some sort of recording ability. About 15 percent of vehicles have data recorders.

(I had an earlier post about these devices on March 11.)

The National Transportation Safety Board made the recommendation but can't issue regulations; that would be up to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The NHTSA says it sees no need for such a requirement because car manufacturers are doing it voluntarily - usually without telling buyers.

Different models collect different amounts of data. Some record nothing more than how fast a vehicle sped up or slowed down, while others collect a range of information about the driver's actions and the condition of a vehicle's mechanical systems.

While that's apparently good enough for the moment, it won't be for long: NHTSA has

proposed that by 2008 the auto industry should outfit their vehicles voluntarily with recorders that would collect 42 pieces of accident data, including speed, braking, seat belt use and the time required for air bags to deploy.

Now, many of these devices at present typically only record for about five seconds and then start over, which means that any data collected would only describe those seconds immediately before an accident. But that's only a matter of memory capacity. It would be simplicity itself to allow the devices to be expanded to record minutes, hours, days of driving data. It's only a matter of cost, not technology. Something else that would be only a matter of cost would be the inclusion of a GPS system that would allow the car to be tracked. (As increasing numbers of us now can be via our cellphones.) As costs come down, why shouldn't that be required as well? After all, it's for public safety. For your own good. How can you possibly object?

And how can you possibly object to protecting our future safety as a nation by having the ability to securely identify almost everyone with what the ACLU called "the backdoor creation of national ID cards in the form of a standardized drivers licenses," as proposed by the 9/11 Commission? Whose side are you on, anyway?

In fact, the next step beyond is already being given serious consideration, as this item from the St. Catharines (Ontario) Standard from last month notes (link via Information Clearinghouse):

An influential organization representing U.S. and Canadian drivers' licence bureaus is developing a proposal for a de facto North American identity card: a biometric licence for 300 million people that could be fed through law enforcement databases to nab holders of multiple forged licences.

Such a card would require the creation of the largest database of biometric data in the world — potentially to include digital images of a person