June 12

Specifically, June 12, 1982. It's a day worth remembering. For some reason, it seems to have been stuffed down the memory hole. Admittedly, the events of that day took place before the general availability of the web; still, you might have thought there would be some account of the particular event of which I'm thinking somewhere in its vast confines. But there seems to be precious little. I did find a documentary for sale about it, a couple of pictures someone put up, a very brief mention of it in a description of the movement of which it was part - and that was pretty much it.

Which seems a genuine shame to me.

What was it, what was this event that deserves to be better remembered? Just the biggest damn peace demonstration in US history.

[O]n June 12, 1982, more than one million people poured into New York City's Central Park to call for nuclear disarmament and nuclear abolition. They came from every state in the union: 3,000 from the tiny state of Vermont, eight busloads from Youngstown, Ohio. When rally organizers quoted crowd estimates based on buses coming into New York City to the police, the police shook their heads, and said "too low." Their kids and their neighbors' kids were all coming, too, in private cars.

Seventeen years before Seattle, the turtles and the teamsters marched arms in arm. The AFL-CIO, the National Union of Hospitals and Healthcare Employees, United Auto Workers and countless other union groups were there. Contingents from Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Australia all made the trip.

Bruce Springsteen was there and Jackson Browne. Coretta Scott King, Bella Abzug and Susan Sarandon. Carl McCall, Linda Ronstadt, Orson Welles, and Winona LaDuke all spoke from the podium.

Which actually didn't matter: Sheep Meadow was jammed so full of people that very few of us could hear a thing from the stage, anyway. We were just too far away.

My clearest recollection of the day was walking along one of the entry roads into Central Park, shaking my head in wonderment at the number of labor unions I saw represented and realizing for the first time just how massive this thing was, because despite walking considerably faster than the average and passing people all the while, I seemed no closer to the front that I had been when I started some good number of blocks back. It was a stunning, stunning day.

June 12 was called by the nuclear freeze movement in support of the UN's Second Special Session on Disarmament, or SSDII. The freeze at that time had proved itself a potent political force, strong enough to face down Ronald Reagan's attempts to Red-bait the movement and to shift the entire question of nuclear weapons from "should we get rid of them" to "how should we go about getting rid of them." That fall, state and local questions favoring a freeze passed overwhelmingly almost everywhere they were on the ballot.

So, you might well ask, what the hey happened? Where did it go? One place was incompetent politics, another was a willingness on the part of too many "leaders" to be bought off with promises and symbols and the trappings of supposed "influence." In June, 1988, another large-scale demonstration in favor of nuclear disarmament was held in connection with a UN session. I wrote this to a friend that August; while it's a little long I think it worth noting because despite the hope expressed, it seems I could already see what was coming.

Linda and I were in New Jersey the weekend of June 11, so we didn't have to make a second trip to go to the New York City demonstration....

That turned out so much better than many people had feared. Less than a week before the date, sources in the national peace movement told me that the expected attendance was 10,000 - and some estimates were running as low as 5,000, a figure that would label the action a total failure. Linda and I made our own way into the city, not hooking up with any group, and because we got there a little late we went directly to 6th Ave. and Central Park South and stood waiting for the march to pass. While we were waiting, we overheard a cop telling someone that the crowd estimate at the UN (where the march started) was 5,000.

We were depressed.

It wasn't the size of the march per se, mind you, but rather the conviction that a small turnout (which 5,000 would be considered to be) would be compared loudly and unfavorably to the 800,000 who turned out in June, 1982 for SSD II. I was convinced much would be made of "the disappearance of the nuclear arms race as an issue" and "the failure of the peace movement to maintain the public's attention" and so on. Linda, trying to look on the dim (which was about as bright as things could get right then) side, said there were probably people already in Central Park at the rally site and noted that several other people were hanging around the corner, obviously waiting for the march, just like us. She decided they weren't just looking, that they were going to join the march when it arrived. "At least that'll make 10 more people," she said. Yeah, right. Big deal. (grump)

Finally, the march came into view, several blocks down 6th Ave. As it approached, we could see the large puppets of the Bread & Puppet Theater in the lead. Finally, the march got to where we were and started to go by us.

And go by us.

And by us.

And by us.

And by us.

Wave after wave of people went by us. Old and young. Male and female. Black, Hispanic, oriental, and white. From a dozen states that we counted. From five foreign nations that we saw. Dancers. Guerrilla theater. Puppets. Floats. People.

60,000 people.

It was wonderful.

The rally in the park was energetic, spirited, alive. Although we ignored the speakers (as we always do), we did note the crowd, and there was a sparkle and zest that runs contrary to the increasingly-jacketed-and-tied mien of some peace movement "leaders" who think that the cause is best advanced by prowling the halls of power and seem to regard their new-found (and marginal) access there as proof of their importance and now find boisterous, blustering, disheveled, and ("Still Crazy After All These Years") sometimes hairy demonstrations - that is, the very kinds of actions that pried open the gates of power through which they've passed - vaguely distasteful. But no matter: If we just keep on keepin' on, sooner or later our "leaders" will catch on and fall in line.

That last line proved to be unrealistic even as what preceded it proved to be both accurate and prophetic. Our "leaders" - both politicians and political - failed us and for whatever reason we were unable to maintain the energy on our own.

Actually, I have to take that back a little: It was less a failure of "leaders" than of buying into a certain concept of leadership. The peace and justice movement here - anywhere, in fact - has been strongest when it developed leaders rather than following them; when the "leaders" emerged from the movement rather than hovering over it and when those leaders were actually followers, who spoke for the movement rather than to it. That is, when they were less leaders than organizers and representatives. The nuclear freeze movement showed the strength of that concept, emerging more or less from nowhere, proposed by a few people no one beyond truly involved peaceniks had heard of, to become a powerful and genuinely mass movement in just a couple of years on the efforts of millions of unknown names who would write a letter or make a phone call or talk to a neighbor or cast a vote that said "yes, I agree."

But the tendency of any movement as it grows is to become increasingly identified with those "leaders," those names most connected to it in the public mind. And we wind up waiting for direction, forgetting that they are where they are because of us, not the other way around. And when those "leaders" of the freeze movement, impressed with their new-found ability to be "heard" in the halls of Congress, to be "seen" if only by implication in the shifting negotiating stances of the Executive, decided that "significant steps had been taken" and so let down their guard and allowed their attention to wander, so, too, did we, often gratefully.

But while the nature of the threat presented by nuclear weapons has shifted, morphed, several times in the last 20-plus years, it has not gone away. And while the focus to some extent has moved away from the threat of a Big Power confrontation (which experts - and I - always thought was the least likely, but still the most devastating, way for the first truly nuclear war to break out) to regional conflicts, there are still clear divisions and lingering definitions that echo the old ways.

United Nations, May 20 (IPS) - The U.S. administration has sought to keep a tight focus on the suspected nuclear activities of Iran and North Korea at month-long talks here on the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). But other countries also have highlighted the impact of Israel's nuclear weapons arsenal on efforts to establish a Middle East nuclear-free zone.

To be sure, diplomats from Arab and developing countries said they share some of U.S. President George W. Bush's concerns about Iran's and North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

During open debate that has lasted for the past two weeks, however, speaker after speaker also has urged the international community to help set up a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East by urging Israel to give up its nuclear weapons programme.

Israel, now believed to be the world's third-largest nuclear power with 200-300 nuclear weapons, took up the old US Cold War argument that its nukes are only for "deterrence," they don't threaten anyone, and the real problem is anyone else having them. Israeli delegates maintained that Israel has never violated a treaty commitment - but since it hasn't signed the NPT, that likely didn't carry much throw-weight with others there.

Ultimately, the talks ended in failure:

[A]fter its three main committees failed to agree on the texts covering the so-called three pillars of the NPT - disarmament, verification of safeguards on national nuclear programmes and the peaceful use of atomic energy - a conference at the United Nations to review the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) ended having accomplished "very little" amid what its President said were widely diverging views tackling nuclear arms and their spread.

So we continue in a world where Israel has nuclear weapons and wants everyone to know it has them while continuing to pretend it doesn't, where India and Pakistan have joined Israel in refusing to sign the NPT, where North Korea has opted out of it, and where Iran might - might, I say - be taking steps toward developing nuclear weapons despite being a party to the treaty.

And, just in case we forget, a world where the US continues to possess over 5,000 operational nuclear weapons with another 5,000 stockpiled in either "reserve" or inactive status. It's not just a matter of maintaining an arsenal, either, as the numbers alone don't tell the whole story: Despite Congressional resistance, the Shrub team continues to push for new classes of nuclear weapons, including the so-called "Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator" and battlefield-scale "mini-nukes." Indeed, Bush has been "shoveling money to U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories as if the Soviet Union still existed and the Cold War still raged," as Fred Kaplan put it in Slate last year: as much money, in real terms (i.e., after allowing for inflation), as Ronald Reagan did during the height of the US-USSR standoff.

No, the issue of nuclear weapons, the threat, the risk, the danger, the insanity, of nuclear weapons has not gone away. It has merely been forgotten.

Footnote One: If you're lucky, you can find a book of photographs about the June 12 demo called You Can't Hug with Nuclear Arms.

Footnote Two: One of the bases for the charge that Iran is conducting a covert nuclear weapons program - traces of weapons-grade uranium on centrifuges - has very likely been refuted:

A preliminary analysis of Pakistani components for enrichment centrifuges identical to ones Iran purchased from Pakistan appears to back Tehran's assertion that the traces of bomb-grade uranium were the result of contamination, Vienna officials familiar with the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] investigation of Iran said.

That, of course, does not completely exonerate Iran, but it does make the case for any sort of sanctions against it much weaker.

Just noted in passing

About 2pm this afternoon someone from San Mateo, California became my 20,000^th recorded hit.

Not much of a milestone, I suppose, but it helps keep my spirits up.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is Titan?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Rocket Science for $2000

In 1929, he launched the first rocket to carry instruments: a barometer, a thermometer, and a camera.

TOMORROW'S FINAL JEOPARDY! CATEGORY
Songs from Musicals

Professional jealousy

Oh my, how I wish I had the network of people who feed tips to Buzzflash, which gets the credit for the link to this story from the June 9 edition of the online version of Gulf News (United Arab Emirates):

A senior US military chief has admitted "good, honest" Iraqis are fighting American forces.

Major General Joseph Taluto said he could understand why some ordinary people would take up arms against the US military because "they're offended by our presence".

In an interview with Gulf News, he said: "If a good, honest person feels having all these Humvees driving on the road, having us moving people out of the way, having us patrol the streets, having car bombs going off, you can understand how they could [want to fight us]."

General Taluto also said while there is a "small core" of foreign fighters, "99.9 per cent" of captured insurgents are Iraqis. He also said that while former regime members are the movers and shakers of the insurrection, the ones who "move the money ... enable things to happen," the real burden is carried by

the foot soldiers. Some are doing it for the money. Some are doing it because they're offended by our presence and believe we are a threat to their way of life. There are various levels.

I certainly hope that Gen. Taluto, who admitted the insurgency is a "substantial" threat to the government and "will be for some time," wasn't hoping for any kind of promotion in the foreseeable future.

Footnote to the preceding

This is from The Independent article.

CO₂ on the increase

1958: A US scientist, Charles Keeling, begins measuring the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO₂) on an extinct volcano in Hawaii. It stands at 315 parts per million (ppm).

1968: The US spacecraft 'Apollo 8' takes the first pictures of Earth from a distance, beautiful but fragile - which help start modern environmentalism. The CO₂ level has reached 323ppm.

1972: The UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm - the moment when the world first recognises environmental threats to the Earth as a whole. CO₂ now at 327ppm.

1988: The world wakes up to the danger of climate change, with an outspoken warning from scientists, and a speech by Margaret Thatcher. CO₂ level stands at 351ppm.

1992: The Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro sees more than 100 countries sign the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the first global warming treaty. CO₂ now at 356ppm.

1995: The Kyoto protocol to the UN's climate treaty is signed in Japan, binding countries, including the US, to make cuts in their CO₂ emissions. The CO₂ level has now reached 360ppm.

2000: Obvious that the 1990s were the hottest decade in the global temperature record, with 1998 the hottest year in the northern hemisphere for 1,000 years. CO₂ is 369ppm.

2001: George Bush withdraws the US, the world's biggest CO₂ emitter, from Kyoto, alleging it will damage America's economy - jeopardising the whole process. CO₂ level now at 371ppm.

2003: First two weeks of August are the hottest period ever recorded in western Europe: 35,000 people die. New record high temperature for Britain. CO₂ now at 375ppm.

2004: After much dithering, Russia ratifies Kyoto, enabling the protocol to enter into force despite the desertion of the United States. But that doesn't stop the CO₂ level rising to 377ppm.

Jumbo deceptions

Updated At one point in the movie "Jumbo," a musical about a down-on-its-luck circus threatened with a takeover by a rival circus, Jimmy Durante is trying to sneak Jumbo the elephant away from creditors. While leading it down a hallway, he's caught by the people he's trying to avoid.

"Where are you going with that elephant?" they demand.

Wide-eyed with innocence, Durante looks left and right and says, "What elephant?"

I'm reminded of that scene every time I hear the Bush administration on the subject of global warming.

On Wednesday, The Independent (UK) reported that

[a]n unprecedented joint statement issued by the leading scientific academies of the world has called on the G8 governments to take urgent action to avert a global catastrophe caused by climate change.

The national academies of science for all the G8 countries, along with those of Brazil, India and China, have warned that governments must no longer procrastinate on what is widely seen as the greatest danger facing humanity.

Among the signers was Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, whose agency's advice has been consistently ignored by the White House.

Climate change is real, global warming is occurring and there is strong evidence that man-made greenhouse gases are implicated in a potentially catastrophic increase in global temperatures, the statement says. "It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities. This warming has already led to changes in the Earth's climate."

Human activities are causing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to rise to a point not reached for at least 420,000 years. Meanwhile average global temperatures rose by 0.6C in the 20th century and are projected to increase by between 1.4C and 5.8C by 2100.

Perhaps most ominously, the report noted the scientific consensus that even if greenhouses gases were to be held to their present levels, global warming and its associated climate effects will continue to increase for some years to come: The global climate typically responds sluggishly to such "forcings," meaning that the effects of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases already pumped into the atmosphere have not yet been fully seen.

"Further changes in climate are therefore unavoidable. Nations must prepare for them," the statement says.

And still the Shrub team blinks and says "What elephant?"

Consider this recent smug observation from Harlan Watson, who is the chief climate negotiator for the State Department despite having no background in climatology - and who got his job after being specifically recommended for it by a lobbyist for Exxon-Mobil:

"We are still not convinced of the need to move forward quite so quickly," he told the BBC in London last month. "There is general agreement that there is a lot known, but also there is a lot to be known."

I wonder if Watson, who holds a doctorate in solid-state physics, would recommend no one use integrated circuits or other solid-state materials because the nature of the transfer of charge across the boundary between two materials is not fully understood at a quantum level. What's more, people have been searching for decades for a quantum explanation for gravity. Should I stop expecting things to fall? Is absolute certainty required before action?

And what would be the effect on US policy if the White House applied the same sort of standards - "do nothing if there are any doubts" - to, say, Iraq? Or the prisoners at Gitmo?

Their determination to ignore facts, to ignore an overwhelming scientific consensus, borders on the astounding - and would be simply astounding if the corporate agenda it serves were not so obvious.

In fact, the very same day as The Independent's story, the New York Times reported (in the same story in which the Watson quote appeared) that

[a] White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.

In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.

Before coming to the White House, the Times says, Cooney was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute. He is a lawyer with a degree in economics and no scientific training - which of course made him the perfect candidate for his present job as

chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues.

Among "dozens" of changes made by Cooney in various reports were changing "uncertainties" to "significant and fundamental uncertainties," changing "difficult" to "extremely difficult," changing "the Earth is undergoing a period of relatively rapid change" to "the Earth may be undergoing a period of relatively rapid change," and removing a whole section on projected glacier loss that he labeled "musings."

The White House insists this is all part of the everyday vetting process, but changes in scientific documents normally would and always should be made or at least approved in their final form by people who know what the hell they are talking about, which clearly is not the case here. The point was made, quite by accident, by Myron Ebell of the industry-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute, a man who in November, 2004 called Sir David King, the chief scientific adviser to the government of Great Britain, an "alarmist with ridiculous views who knows nothing about climate change." Such editing, he said, is necessary for "consistency" in meshing programs with policy.

I'm sure it is. I'm sure that's exactly why it was done. The question is what is driving the policy? Clearly, what is not driving it is any connection to scientific reality.

Updated with the news that Cooney has resigned. The White House insists it's unconnected to the revelations about his creative editing, but knowing their penchant for message control, that seems unlikely.

A footnote to the update is that in reporting on it, Raw Story quoted Philip Clapp, the president of the National Environmental Trust, as saying

"His resignation is less surprising than the fact that the lead oil industry lobbyist on global warming should have been given this kind of power over climate science and scientists."

Frankly, Mr. Clapp, I think you have that exactly backwards.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What are solid and liquid?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Rocket Science for $1200

Gemini spacecraft were launched into orbit with this rocket that shares its name with a moon of Saturn.

Will wonders never cease

Just days after Sen. Joe Biden (D-Big Wet Wimp) said John Bolton's nomination could not be stopped and that Bush could probably get away with refusing to supply demanded information relation to the nomination, CNN was able to report that

Senate Democrats will not allow a vote on President Bush's choice for U.N. ambassador unless the White House hands over records of communications intercepts Bolton sought from the secretive National Security Agency, Minority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday. ...

The Senate fell four votes shy of the 60 needed to cut off debate on Bolton's nomination in May after two Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee urged their colleagues to hold the issue open.

Reid is now saying no info, no Bolton.

In fairness to Biden, I should note that he was one of the two who were urging votes against cloture - but still, the whole thing gets me (and gets me down). I mean, it's an amazing thing that the Dims haven't caved yet, which is good on general principles, but why in hell is this, of all places, where they find a vertebra or two? The US's reputation at the UN as an unreasoning, narrow-minded, self-interested, insular bully is so well- and fairly-established that someone who combined the negotiating skills of Henry Clay, the brains of Albert Einstein, and the spiritual authority of St. Francis of Assisi could not undo it. Frankly, as much of a jerk and boob as he is, Bolton could hardly damage the US's standing any further than Bush has already done.

But this is where the Dummycrats have chosen to take a stand. Meanwhile, they let reactionary judges pass right through to lifetime positions on the federal appeals courts (while, dumbfoundingly, claiming victory) because they didn't have the stomach for a real fight and now apparently are going to raise no more than a symbolic fuss over the nomination of Rep. Christopher Cox (R, What Else?-CA) to head the Securities and Exchange Commission. Cox, a "free-market conservative," would replace previous Bush nominee William Donaldson, who pissed off corporate interests by not being sufficiently pro-business. Cox would give the five-member board a majority of members opposed to regulatory controls.

This, too, is an area where the outcome is a lot more likely to have a real impact on people's lives now and in the future than John Bolton screeching at UN delegates. And again it's an area where the Dims folded their hand without even attempting to play their cards: All they are looking for in return for letting Cox sail through is "assurances" that the White House will not stall on nominating two Democrats to the remaining two seats.

By tradition, the White House often accepts recommendations for the Democratic seats from the Senate Democratic leadership.

And we all know how important long-standing Senate tradition is to the GOPpers (cf. "filibuster").

So reactionary judges get lifetime positions, agents of Big Business are in charge of the SEC - but BY GOD, WE'RE GONNA NAIL JOHN BOLTON TO THE WALL, YESSIRRE!

We are so screwed.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is a Mandarin orange? (Acceptable: tangerine)

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Rocket Science for $400

Rocket propellants come in these two basic types, combined in hybrid systems.

I don't want some of what they're smoking

The Los Angeles Times reports that literally just days before the conclusion of an 8½-month racketeering trial against Big Tobacco, a culmination of an effort spanning years, the government's lawyers have cut the demands they are making on the tobacco companies by over 90%.

Without explanation, government lawyers late Tuesday asked U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler to order an industry-funded five-year, $10-billion smoking-cessation program - instead of the 25-year, $130-billion program they had outlined previously.

So instead of an average of $5.2 billion a year for 25 years, the feds now want the companies to pony up $2 billion a year for five years. Frankly, not a lot of money for the industry: The six American tobacco companies spend twice that much every year on advertising a deadly, addictive product linked to over 400,000 deaths in the US alone every year.

And it's also not a lot of money for an industry that has over the last eight election cycles given over $54 million in political contributions, 75% of it to Republicans. That's an investment that seems once again to have paid off.

Footnote One: Eight Senate and House Democrats have demanded that the inspector general of the Justice Department investigate this sudden, last minute, and astonishingly large concession to the tobacco giants. They

expressed concern that top political appointees were overruling the trial lawyers to shield the industry from an expensive loss. ...

Regarding the call for an investigation, [DOJ] spokesman [Eric] Holland said the inspector general "will, no doubt, consider the request."

Uh, huh. And just what will he consider it?

Footnote Two: In their summation, mouthpieces for the profit barons of the real killer weed argued that

[c]igarette makers did not violate the anti-racketeering - or RICO - statute, but even if they did ... the remedies [urged by the government] were improper.

Or, as my mother used to describe that sort of argument,

Neighbor One: My lawn mower was broken when you returned it to me.

Neighbor Two: I never borrowed your lawn mower and besides, it was broken when you loaned it to me.

Triple play

Wow. Three separate comments prompted by one brief article.

A group of American security guards in Iraq have alleged they were beaten, stripped and threatened with a snarling dog by US marines when they were detained after an alleged shooting incident outside Falluja last month. ...

The security guards claim the shooting incident was a case of mistaken identity. A spokeswoman for the company told the LA Times that the guards had fired warning shots into the air when an unidentified vehicle approached their vehicle as it passed through Falluja, but had not fired at any marines.

Okay, first thing, raised in the article itself: Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution said the incident

raised the question of what happens to contractors if they are caught doing something wrong, such as firing on civilians, as their legal status is not defined. "If the marines think [the contractors] did do something illegal there is no process they can go through. Who are they going to hand them over to?" Mr Singer said. "There have been more than 20,000 [contractors] on the ground in Iraq for more than two years and not one has been prosecuted for anything."

They have been, thus far, largely a law unto themselves, answerable to no one. Which would seem on its face to be a stupid arrangement but it's one the White House endorses because to do otherwise is to question the whole Iraq enterprise, which has from day one of the invasion revolved around seeing how much of the Iraqi economy could be handed over to private, particularly American, corporations. Challenging the privileged position of the contractors by definition challenges the privileged position of such as Halliburton - and that's something the Shrub team is loath to do.

Second thing, accidentally revealed by the article: A lawyer for two of the contractors said his clients and others were subjected to "physical and psychological abuse" including being "slammed around," stripped them to their underwear, and having loaded weapons put to their heads.

"I never in my career have treated anybody so inhumane," one of the contractors, Rick Blanchard, a former Florida state trooper, wrote in an email quoted in the Los Angeles Times. "They treated us like insurgents, roughed us up, took photos, hazed [bullied] us, called us names." [emphasis added]

So it seems that "inhumane" treatment is the norm dished out to "insurgents."

And the third thing, left for last so we can leave this with a frustrated chuckle:

A Marine Corps spokesman denied that abuse had taken place and said an investigation was continuing.

Now, uh, just how could they know that if they're still investigating? Whoever it was that said that, they need a lot more practice at spinning.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is Crab Louie? (Acceptable: Crab Louis)

JEOPARDY!
Salad Days for $1000

This type of orange adds a sweet tang to the classic Chinese chicken salad.

Increasing the tension

To be honest, I'm not quite sure why I'm posting this. Probably because it relates to a debate I used to have with people I worked with.

The Independent (UK) has reported on another study that has indicated a relationship between living close to high-tension power lines and the risk of developing childhood leukemia.

Although this is not the first such report, the idea is still quite controversial, largely because no one knows a mechanism by which the power lines could be connected to the development of the disease. But I have to admit that I find the consistency of the results - which tend, as this one did, to find a "small but statistically significant" effect - pretty persuasive. The article notes four other such studies:

* Swedish study finds threefold increased risk of childhood leukaemia in families living within 50 metres of power lines.

* Canadian study finds 80 per cent increased risk for children within 100 metres of lines.

* Analysis of nine studies finds doubling of childhood leukaemia in families exposed to magnetic fields of 0.4 microteslas (within 60 metres).

* International Agency for Cancer Research classifies extremely low frequency magnetic fields as "possibly carcinogenic".

The study here, led by Gerald Draper of the Childhood Cancer Research Group at the University of Oxford, was published in the British Medical Journal. It considered 10,000 cases in England and Wales over 33 years and found that children living within 200 meters (about 650 feet) of high-voltage lines had a 70% increased risk of leukemia, while those living 200-600 meters (about 650-2000 feet) away had a 23% increased risk. The latter figure can easily be dismissed as a statistical artifact - i.e., coincidence - but it's much harder to do that with the former.

Not impossible, though: Because we're talking about portions of portions of populations, the actual numbers are still small. The increase in the number of cases of leukemia per year in England and Wales predicted by these results is about five out of 420, an increased incidence of about 1.2%. Not insignificant to those five children and their families, but still it could be coincidence.

Then there is still the matter of how living near power lines would connect to leukemia. The only suggestion the article mentions is the possibility that particles of air pollution near the lines could become electrically charged, making them more likely to get stuck in the lungs once inhaled. While that's plausible, it leaves open the question of what the link between that and blood cancers would be. Meanwhile, others have other ideas:

John Swanson, scientific adviser to National Grid Transco and a co-author of the study, said: "The findings strongly suggest something is happening but leave open what that something is. I personally tend to the view that it is some characteristic of the populations that the power lines pass through."

The fact that he's an adviser to the outfit that owns the high-voltage power lines in question should give us pause, but the demographics of an affected population is one of the things that researchers have to consider.

Still, it seems to me that there's an eagerness to acquit the power lines that leads some, such as Swanson, to engage in speculation and others to say things that are just odd:

An editorial in the BMJ says magnetic fields generated by Britain's 4,500 miles of power lines are very weak, amounting to 1 per cent of the Earth's magnetic field "which affects all of us all the time. So it would be surprising if they caused leukaemia," it adds.

Frankly, that argument just doesn't make sense. First, it's disturbingly similar in form to the hoary arguments for the supposed safety of nuclear power: Oh, you get more radiation from the Sun or from living in a stone house or from a chest X-ray, so stop your whining, you big wuss.

Second, the concern is not that power lines cause leukemia, it's that living near them makes it, for some reason, more likely a child would get leukemia. As a comparison, consider someone saying we shouldn't be concerned with AIDS because people rarely die of it, instead they die of some opportunistic infection like pneumonia - "and AIDS doesn't cause pneumonia." No, it doesn't. But it does make it more likely you'll catch it and more likely to die of it if you do.

Third, on a more I guess philosophical level, why is it apparently considered impossible that the natural environment could be damaging to some small portion of the population? No, evolution, which works on populations as a whole and does not affect every individual member in exactly the same way, does not rule that out: Consider that there are people who are allergic to sunshine and that exposure to the Sun is related to developing malignant melanoma. How much more natural and necessary to life can you get than sunlight? But that doesn't make it harmless in all persons. What I'm arguing here is that isn't it possible that by whatever mechanism, the Earth's magnetic field increases the risk of leukemia in some persons? Could it in fact be related to the incidence of the disease? If so, living near high-power lines, exposed to some small additional magnetic fields, might well be responsible for some small increase in leukemia cases.

Note carefully that I'm not saying that magnetic fields, either natural or from power lines, are responsible for cases of leukemia. What I'm saying is that unless a connection between magnetic fields and leukemia has been ruled out, which it apparently hasn't, BMJ's argument doesn't scan.

Still, we have to come to some kind of at least temporary bottom line here and I still keep coming back to what I used to tell people who asked me about it (which they did because of where I was working at the time): The effect is, again, statistically significant, but it's small. So my advice is, if you don't have to live near a power line, don't. But if you do wind up living near one, don't spend a lot of time worrying and stressing over it: That very likely would be worse for your general health than the power lines are.

The devil is in the details

And along with it, quite often, is the truth. Time reports that

[a]fter nearly 60 years at the pinnacle of American intelligence - and at the elbow of Presidents - the CIA director is no longer automatically welcome at the President's National Security Council (NSC) meetings. John Negroponte, the new director of National Intelligence, has taken his chair. ...

Negroponte will participate in meetings of the NSC and its domestic counterpart, the Homeland Security Council (HSC). Meanwhile, CIA Director Porter Goss "will attend NSC and HSC meetings at the direction of the President."

Negroponte, the twit who ran the contra war out of Honduras, during which time he called Hurricane Joan, which devastated Nicaragua, "a contra victory," is successfully consolidating his control over intelligence services. The deeper meaning of this is that in the face of its manifest failures in producing accurate intelligence and even greater failures in actually paying attention to it in the odd cases when it got it, the White House is becoming even more insular, more determined than ever to ignore the world in order to fit information into a pre-existing ideological framework where "the intelligence and facts [can be] fixed around the policy."

The bad news, the danger, in that, is obvious. However, there might be yet one more bit of truth hidden in those details: I've argued before, most recently a couple of weeks ago, that people tend to become more conservative when they are under stress. The CIA, for all its failings and all its evils over the years, was at least nominally independent of the Executive. Kicking the CIA out of the NSC meetings and pulling it off supplying the daily intelligence briefing in favor of aggressive ideologues like Negroponte reflects a circle-the-wagons mentality that is the mark of people who feel pressured, not who feel confident.

We might be having more of an effect than even Shrub's plummeting approval numbers already indicate.

Hope springs eternal and all that.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is cole slaw?

JEOPARDY!
Salad Days for $600

Some say this salad of crabmeant on a bed of lettuce in a chili sauce was created at Seattle's Olympic Club.

Further illustrating an earlier point

I've put up only one post about the dispute over the balloting in the race between Democrat Christine Gregoire and GOPper Dino Rossi for governor of Washington, that one back at the end of December. As I said at the time, "I don't get too much into GOPpy v. Dummycrat deals" and I figure if you're interested there are blogs just drowning in such things so I don't have much to contribute. In fact, I wrote about it then more to point up what a bunch of hypocritical, whining crybabies conservatives are: After a machine recount showed Rossi's initial margin of 261 votes shrinking to just 42,

Democrat Christine Gregoire wanted a manual recount.

The GOPpy response was immediate and predictable: They declared victory, had a party, and called on her to drop the whole idea and concede defeat. If she failed to do so, she'd "have to answer to the public" if things "dragged on" into January - and, they warned, even if a recount reversed the result, it would be "very difficult for her to be seen as a legitimate governor."

During the recount, they tried to prevent counting of some votes that were found to have been mistakenly not counted. And when the recount showed Gregoire winning by 129 votes, the same GOPpers who demanded she quit when she trailed by 42 votes to avoid "dragging things out," filed suit to throw out the results and demanded a new election.

Well, the case went to court, during the course of which the GOPpers, the same sort of people who will sneer "get over it" if you mention Florida 2000 and call you a paranoid conspiracy nut if you dare to refer to Ohio 2004, repeatedly labeled every slip and snag in election procedures as "sinister." To no avail, as it turns out. On Monday, they lost.

The election - decided by an amazingly narrow margin of 129 votes out of 2.9 million cast - included 1,678 illegally cast ballots, Chelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges found.

But in a ruling issued in his Wenatchee courtroom, Bridges rejected GOP claims that the election was stolen through errors and fraud, and said Republicans had failed to prove that Rossi would have won had the illegal votes been disregarded.

"Unless an election is clearly invalid, when the people have spoken their verdict should not be disturbed by the courts," Bridges said. Nullifying the election, he said, would be "the ultimate act of judicial egotism and judicial activism."

In the wake of the decision, Rossi said he would not appeal, putting an end to the dispute. But again typical for his ilk, he couldn't just leave it at that.

"With today's decision, and because of the political makeup of the Washington State Supreme Court, which makes it almost impossible to overturn this ruling, I am ending the election contest," Rossi said at his campaign headquarters in Bellevue.

"Waaaaa! You're unfair! You're mean! You're biased! You just don't like me!"

The psychological term is projection.

Frankengeek

After five frustrating weeks, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have managed to free the Mars rover Opportunity from a sand dune where it had been stuck.

Opportunity's wheels started slipping April 26 during a planned 295-foot trip. While trying to drive over a foot-high sand dune, the robotic explorer stopped moving, its wheels hub-deep in soft soil.

Engineers spent weeks with an Opportunity mock-up figuring out what commands to give the robot to free it, but the maneuvers took time. The rover inched forward less than a foot in a month, losing most of its traction every time it tried to roll.

The soil in which Opportunity got stuck was described earlier by one of the JPL engineers as being like talcum powder, so loose that it provided virtually no traction. The plan the team ultimately worked out, which has succeeded, was to spin the rover's wheels in short bursts, very slowly inching it forward. Now, after moving, again, less than a foot in a month, it has gone forward several feet in one day, leaving behind a clear trail of tire marks, visible in the photo.

Opportunity and its twin Spirit landed on Mars in January 2004 for what were supposed to be 90-day missions. So far, they have exceeded those expectations by 487 and 507 days, respectively. 

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What are flying saucers?

JEOPARDY!
Salad Days for $200

This side dish takes its name from Dutch words meaning "cabbage salad."

The Iraqi insurgency is also a "spent force"

The New York Times for Saturday has some news of our latest forgotten war.

During the last six months, American and Afghan officials have predicted the collapse of the Taliban, the hard-line Islamists thrown out of power by American forces in 2001, citing their failure to disrupt the presidential election last October and a lack of activity last winter.

But the intensity of the fighting here in Zabul Province, and in parts of adjoining Kandahar and Uruzgan Provinces - roughly 100 square miles of mountain valleys in all - reveals the Taliban to be still a vibrant fighting force supplied with money, men and weapons. ...

With a ready source of men, and apparently plentiful weapons, the Taliban may not be able to hold ground, but they can continue their insurgency indefinitely, attacking the fledgling Afghan government, scaring away aid groups and leaving the province ungovernable, some Afghan and American officials say.

US forces have taken to making probes into the region in an attempt to provoke the Taliban into firefights, generating "some of the heaviest combat in Afghanistan in the last three years," but still finding the Taliban resupplied with willing volunteers. What's more, they've been finding that villagers are supporting the Taliban because "they don't loot and they respect the women," an informant told them.

Which, as is so often true, indicates that the problem may not be so much with America's foes as with its friends.

Good thing marijuana isn't a treatment...

...or they'd just be SOL if they were here.

Infantile paralysis. Poliomyelitis. Polio. The word still strikes a nerve. When I was a child, it was still a major threat, something to be feared. I had an uncle who contracted polio. He lived, but as a complete bed-ridden invalid for the rest of his life. My brother, not three years older than me, was a "polio pioneer," one of the 1.8 million school children who participated in the first full field trial of the Salk vaccine. I remember the Salk vaccine, the painful injections and the boosters. And I remember the Sabin vaccine, which I got as part of a mass public inoculation program.

Now, thanks to those vaccines and a major worldwide effort, polio has basically disappeared from the US to the extent that I've met school-age children who don't even know what it is and the incidence and range of polio has been dramatically reduced over the last 15 or so years.

Reduced - but not eliminated. And it's coming back. Time magazine has a short slide show about it; the following text is constructed from excerpts from there.

Indonesia this week launched a quick vaccination program, targeting some 6.4 million children for immunization over a two-day period in the hope of stemming a polio outbreak in he Sukabumi region, where polio has recently affected 15 children.

The outbreak comes after ten years of Indonesia being free of polio. Indonesia is the 16th previously polio-free country to be re-infected in the past two years; 13 of the others are in Africa.

The government hopes a quick mass immunization program will contain the first outbreak of the crippling disease in a decade. Polio is a waterborne virus that usually affects infants and toddlers, causing paralysis, withered muscles and sometimes death. There is no cure.

This and previous short posts about efforts against polio in Nigeria and Liberia and India combine to make a brutal reminder of what is really important in this world and what spending (so far) something around $175 billion in Iraq is truly costing.

I want some of what they're smoking

In a continuing testament to the disproof of the hoary contention that the Supreme Court is "above" considerations of prevailing political opinion, the Supremes on Monday ruled that

[f]ederal authorities may prosecute sick people whose doctors prescribe marijuana to ease pain, ... concluding that state laws don't protect users from a federal ban on the drug.

The decision is a stinging defeat for marijuana advocates who had successfully pushed 10 states to allow the drug's use to treat various illnesses.

It's not only stinging, it's asinine.

First, the contention that marijuana has not been shown to be therapeutically effective in relieving symptoms of some conditions is utter bull and on-going studies continue to show its potential. The FDA doesn't agree - but the FDA refuses to do or to consider any studies on the topic, apparently for fear of what they'd show, so it is in no position to have any opinion on the matter.

Second, the marijuana used by the women who filed the suit was homegrown and home-consumed, it was not sold or exchanged for anything of value, and it never crossed state lines, which would seem to put it beyond the reach of Congress's authority to regulate "interstate commerce."

Neither of those facts mattered to the Court, which seemed intent on finding a way - any way - to declare federal power when it comes to the evil scourge of drugs which are destroying our civilization!

This, be sure to note, is the same Supreme Court that

earlier invalidated federal laws dealing with gun possession near schools and violence against women on the grounds the activity was too local to justify federal intrusion.

Apparently, what matters are "too local" to be overridden by federal law depends on whether the targets of those laws are pot-smoking cancer patients or NRA members.

Ten states currently have medical marijuana laws; what I'd like to see now is all of them (as I believe, but am not certain, at least one of them has) pass additional laws banning state and local authorities from any cooperation with federal agents in investigating, arresting, or prosecuting medical marijuana users - and then for all the rest of the states and DC to join them.

Footnote: In his opinion for the 6-3 majority, John Paul Stevens wrote that

there are other legal options for patients, "but perhaps even more important than these legal avenues is the democratic process, in which the voices of voters allied with these (California women) may one day be heard in the halls of Congress."

Why, you pompous, bloviating jackass.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
Who is Jay Gatsby?

FINAL JEOPARDY!
Familiar Phrases

This two-word term entered the English language after a pilot reported seeing nine of them near Mount Ranier in June 1947.

The empire strikes back

The Christian Science Monitor for Monday says that

[t]he Bush administration appears to have opened a whole new front in its war on terror: a forceful, full-scale defense of the morality of its detention-camp policies.

First came harsh criticism of Newsweek magazine for its since-retracted charge of Koran abuse at the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. More recently top officials have pushed back - hard - against Amnesty International's use of "gulag" to describe Guantánamo's conditions.

A week ago, when "The Big" Dick Cheney said of Amnesty International's criticism of Gitmo, "I don't take them seriously," I suggested this is exactly what the White House was up to:

[G]oing out of your way supposedly to dismiss something ... is actually to admit to its importance. Despite [Cheney's] attempt at an attitude of flip unconcern, it seems obvious that Amnesty's "scathing" criticism of the US has hit a nerve and the administration has given thought to how it will try to recover.

Thus, CSM rightly refers to "the intensity and coordination of administration remarks." This is a planned campaign, right down to the attempts to minimize the new revelations (something else I noted) by blaming the press for covering a few "isolated incidents." But the article is profoundly wrong to the extent it implies that the White House is trying to repair or even maintain the image of the US. This is about undermining and if possible discrediting opposition. For example, after noting that last week, Amnesty International called Guantánamo "the gulag of our times," CSM says

President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld took turns bashing this characterization. Clearly, the administration as a whole had decided that the comparison of US practices with those of the totalitarian Soviet Union was something it could not allow to pass unchallenged.

There was the gulag quote. But report also accused the US of "war crimes," of torture, of a "blatant disregard for international human rights and humanitarian law" that made "a mockery" of claims the US is a defender of human rights. Yet White House officials have fallen largely silent about those charges, focusing instead on the single world "gulag."

Why? Simple. Not because this is the central charge, not because they're particularly sensitive about a comparison to the Soviets (although, I admit, for the neocons among them the comparison could be stinging) - but because they decided this was a weak spot in AI's case, a bit of hyperbole that provided them with a point of attack. It's the classic right-wing tactic: Pluck a single phrase, even a single word, out of context and attack it as if you are thereby attacking the entire argument and as if by forcing a retreat on that sometimes exceedingly narrow point you have refuted the entire concept. It's a political variation on the lawyer's game of "false in one, false in all." Just consider a few recent unconnected examples:

- Dan Rather and CBS were denounced and defamed in the wake of the Bush-AWOL story. The method was to attack the documents, which seemingly were faked, to distract attention from their content, which was accurate - followed by claiming that because the documents were invalid, that proved that Bush was not AWOL. Of course that's nonsense; the most that could be rationally claimed is that CBS hadn't proved that he was AWOL, but irrationality is no bar for these people.

- Ward Churchill was condemned, verbally attacked, and threatened across two states because of an angry essay he wrote in reaction to 9/11. It's fair to estimate that 99% of the vituperation was directed at one two-word phrase - "little Eichmanns" - that occurs precisely once in the 5600-word essay and which could have been removed without affecting the argument one jot, but the attack on which was used to discredit the entire piece.

- Newsweek's story about a Qur'an being flushed down a toilet centered on the information that the military was about to admit to at least one case in an upcoming report. When the magazine retracted the story because the source said he couldn't be sure if the information he'd seen about such an incident had been in that report, the White House insisted - with a good deal of media acquiescence - that the retraction discredited the very idea that such a thing ever happened.

In each case, arguing a single point is used as a substitute for arguing the underlying concept. It's an effective, if dishonest, tactic, and therefore appealing to the reactionaries on two grounds. Going after AI over the word "gulag" is just another example.

Amnesty, for its part, has stepped back some from the word, Reuters reports. Such a climbdown is usually a serious tactical mistake; the right generally deals with such matters with a stubborn refusal to admit even the possibility of error combined with attacks on the credibility of their opponents. Still, if you're going to do it at all, sooner is better than later - and AI, in the person of the executive director of Amnesty International USA, didn't go so far as to retract the word:

Asked about the comparison, [William] Schulz said, "Clearly this is not an exact or a literal analogy."

"... But there are some similarities. The United States is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons into which people are being literally disappeared ... And in some cases, at least, we know that they are being mistreated, abused, tortured and even killed."

The problem with his answer is that the lead on the story was, of course, that AI

doesn't "know for sure" that the military is running a "gulag,"

with his description of "similarities" buried some paragraphs down. Had it been me, I would have said "Yes, it's a gulag!" picked up from "the United States is maintaining" and then ended with

"Is it as big, as deadly, as the old Soviet system? Of course not. But gulags are not defined by their size but by their secrecy, their violations of international law, their denial of human rights. And I'm really astonished by the argument: Is the White House saying, are you saying, that Stalin's Soviet Union is our moral standard? That as long as we're not as bad as Stalin we're okay? That's an incredibly twisted way of thinking."

But, just like irrationality, that presents no problem for the WHS* and their minions.

Footnote, Another Question That Won't Be Asked Div.: The CSM quotes DefSec Rumpled as saying "I can't imagine anyone who has any understanding of what a gulag is ... using that."

Mister Secretary, are you saying that Amnesty International has no understanding of what a gulag is?

*WHS = White House Sociopaths

A knee-slapper

You know those jokes, some of them clever, most of them dumb, that make the rounds of email and clutter up your inbox? Well, this could raise their overall quality if it was to join them in being spread around - because I think this is just hilarious.

The far-right nutcases at "Human Events" asked "15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders" (Phyllis Schlafly was among them, which gives you an idea of what it takes to be considered a "scholar" or "leader" among this crew) to come up with a Top Ten list of the "Most Harmful Books" of the last 200 years. What clearly emerges is instead a Top Ten list of Books Most Influential in Challenging Reactionary Inanities. It becomes more of a must-read list that gives some insight into the fears that haunt those that have given themselves over to the Dark Side.

The order of the list, presented here in countdown fashion, was based on a sliding point scale.

#10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes, called "a recipe for ever-expanding government."

#9. Beyond Good and Evil by Freidrich Nietzsche, for expanding on his notion "God is dead" and arguing that life is a struggle in which the strong seek to dominate the weak. "The Nazis loved Nietzsche."

#8. The Course of Positive Philosophy by Auguste Comte, because it asserted that human rights are not given by God (and because it introduced the word "sociology").

#7. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, which "disparaged traditional stay-at-home motherhood." In her younger years, it was said, Friedan was "a Stalinist Marxist [and] the political intimate of the leaders of America's Cold War fifth column."

#6. Das Kapital by Karl Marx, who "could not have predicted 21st Century America: a free, affluent society based on capitalism and representative government that people the world over envy and seek to emulate."

#5. Democracy and Education by John Dewey, due to his championing of "secular humanism" and his having "rejected traditional religion and moral absolutes." "He disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking 'skills' instead," which "helped nurture the Clinton generation."

#4. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Dr. Alfred Kinsey, because it, along with the companion volume Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, was "designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy."

#3. Quotations from Chairman Mao, since "Western leftists were enamored with its Marxist anti-Americanism."

#2. Mein Kampf by Adolph Hitler even though it "was originally ignored," drawing attention only after Hitler was already in power.

And the Number One Top Ten Most Harmful Book of the last 200 years:

#1. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, blamed for directly causing "The Evil Empire" and yes, they did use the phrase.

Other books which got votes, this time in decreasing order:

The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich
What Is To Be Done by V.I. Lenin
Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner
Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel
The Promise of American Life by Herbert Croly
Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin (which, by the way, is called The Origin of Species, no second "the," but then again, these are conservative scholars)
Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault
Soviet Communism: A New Civilization by Sidney and Beatrice Webb
Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead
Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader
Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
The Greening of America by Charles Reich
The Limits to Growth by Club of Rome
Descent of Man by Charles Darwin

Y'know, there are a number of books on that list which I haven't read. Library, here I come.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
Who is Rip Van Winkle?

JEOPARDY!
New York Stories for $2000

This title character of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel lived on Long Island.

Believe me, Adia

Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, reporting on the results of the oh-so official investigation of reports of mistreatment of Qur'ans at Guantanamo Bay, insisted

that the inquiry found "no credible evidence" that a member of the military joint task force at Guantanamo ever flushed a Koran down a toilet. "The matter is considered closed," Hood stated.

Of course, the inquiry, which could fairly be called extensive but unenthusiastic, did confirm incidents in which copies of the book were kicked, stepped on, soaked in water, and pissed on, but not flushed down a toilet! So just get off our damn backs, okay?

I mean, why are we even taking this seriously? Do we really, really think the military can be trusted to investigate itself, especially in light of its record in Afghanistan, in Iraq, at Gitmo, and beyond? A record of denying the existence of any abuses until the weight of evidence made it unavoidable and then admitting as little as possible and calling it "an isolated case?" Just how many isolated cases does it take to equal one pattern?

Even in the cases of desecration it admitted, the brass did their best to play them down, sometimes laughably.

In the incident involving urine, which took place this past March, Southern Command said a guard left his observation post, went outside and urinated near an air vent, and "the wind blew his urine through the vent" and into a cell block.

It said a detainee told guards the urine "splashed on him and his Koran." The statement said the detainee was given a new prison uniform and Koran, and that the guard was reprimanded and given duty in which he had no contact with prisoners. Army Capt. John Adams, a spokesman at Guantanamo, said the inquiry deemed the incident "accidental."

What a joke! Accidental? We're expected to accept that he went out to urinate, and instead of going to the latrine he just happened to stand by an air vent and there just happened to be a wind which just happened to be blowing in the right direction and which just happened to be strong enough to divert the steam? Accidental? And even though this was an "accident" he then was assigned to duties with zero prisoner contact? Accidental?

And then they wonder why people here and around the world don't trust the US's claims of its good intentions. Oh, my.

Footnote: Hood also said "Mishandling of a Koran here is never condoned."

Damn straight! We'll take 'em, lock 'em up maybe for life, "stress" 'em, humiliate 'em, torture 'em, but mishandle their Qur'ans? Never! Never, I say!

Go Mom! Go Dad!

Several - I'm not sure how many, actually - years ago there was a dreadful sci-fi flick called "Mom and Dad Save the Universe." It was so bad you can't even find out stuff about it online except a few comments on how bad it was.

Well, Mom and Dad may not be saving the universe these days, but some of them are saving something more down to Earth. Friday's New York Times had the good news.

Two years into the war in Iraq, as the Army and Marines struggle to refill their ranks, parents have become boulders of opposition that recruiters cannot move.

Mothers and fathers around the country said they were terrified that their children would have to be killed - or kill - in a war that many see as unnecessary and without end.

Around the dinner table, many parents said, they are discouraging their children from serving.

At schools, they are insisting that recruiters be kept away, incensed at the access that they have to adolescents easily dazzled by incentive packages and flashy equipment.

As the war in Iraq has dragged on and bogged down - or, perhaps more accurately, revealed its real nature - the portion of parents prepared to recommend the military to their children has dropped dramatically. And while, as the article notes, parents really can't stop their 18-and-up children from enlisting, not many of those youngsters are willing to join the military over their parents' objections. (So much for "children never listen to their parents any more.")

In the face of this, the military is dropping dark hints about what may come. Last month, chief Army recruiter Maj. Gen. Michael Rochelle said the all-volunteer force could be in jeopardy. And recently-retired chief of staff for Army recruiting Col. David Slotwinski said that if parents don't help "make the all-volunteer force successful," then "you're faced with the alternative, and the alternative is what they were opposed to the most, mandatory service." That is, help us grab your kids or we'll draft 'em.

Many of the parents are most disturbed by the aggressive campaigns recruiters engage in, especially if those parents learn only belatedly about the requirement of the No Child Left Behind Act that military recruiters get access to lists of students' names, addresses, and phone numbers unless their parents specifically say otherwise. That's an option of which many parents say they were unaware because the information was buried in a mass of other papers from the schools.

In the midst of this seriousness and parental anger, however, this struck me funny:

The Pentagon ... is especially vexed by a generation of more activist parents who have no qualms about projecting their own views onto their children.

Remember when the knock on the current generation of parents was that they were too permissive, that they didn't teach their children values? Now, apparently, the complaint is that they do teach them values. Just, shall we say, inconvenient ones.

Footnote: Another possible aspect to this is it's an exercise in pre-emptive CYA. Before the 2004 election, a number of people predicted that the draft would return in its wake. The military and the White House insisted it wouldn't. Could it be that the ground is being laid for blaming war opponents for a call to resume conscription?

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is the Plaza Hotel?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
New York Stories for $1200

In a Washington Irving story, he naps for twenty years in the Catskills.

Every dark cloud and all that

Or, if you prefer, better late then never. Let's just hope it's not a day late and a dollar short.

Writing on CNET's News.com, columnist Declan McCullagh says

[p]oliticians are starting to realize that permitting data brokers like Acxiom and ChoicePoint to buy and sell your Social Security number like a raffle ticket may not be that wise after all. ...

By executive order, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt required all federal agencies to use the SSN "exclusively" to identify individuals, and the IRS began to employ it as a tax ID number in the early 1960s. Later that decade, divulging your SSN became necessary to buy Treasury bonds, obtain Medicare benefits, and join the military. The Social Security Amendments of 1972 slapped SSNs on school children and foreign workers with visas, and a 1983 law required banks to obtain SSNs for savings accounts.

Nowadays, the SSN has mercilessly extruded its way into the private sector. Many corporations and universities use the SSN as a unique identifier, as does everyone from physicians to insurance companies to mutual funds.

The result is that, as McCullagh observes, your Social Security number has turned in a de facto national ID number, used to track you in public and private from birth to death. It has come to present not only the most tempting of targets for identity thieves but, by the very fact of its extensive use, a serious threat to personal privacy, an issue I think I've posted about before. (I just did a quick count of posts which contained the word "privacy." Not all of them were about Social Security numbers or their associated databases, but they are related to the broader issue of privacy. Including this post, there are 101 of them.)

McCullagh notes that there are at least four bills now in Congress, with at least one more supposedly on the way, seeking in some way to limit "misuse" of SSNs and says the expectation is that some legislation will be passed this year - a development, I will note, I predicted in the wake of revelations that members of Congress were among those whose privacy was threatened by Bank of America's loss of computer tapes containing personal information on federal employees.

Typically for Congress, however, the bills do rather less than meets the eye.

H.R.1745, introduced by Rep. Clay Shaw (R-FL,22) and 38 cosponsors and the similar S.29 introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and four cosponsors, would generally outlaw the "sale or display" of Social Security numbers - but the exceptions are much more extensive than the limitations. Not only are there exceptions for "national security" and "law enforcement" purposes, pretty much an open door for government to do what it pleases, but private industry also is offered several gimmies. Feinstein's bill, in fact, specifically allows the continued use of SSNs by credit agencies and in obtaining of information by businesses. Frankly, it's so hard to see what present purposes SSNs are put to which would be hindered by either bill that, while they might help with identity theft, they could hardly make any difference at all in the wider and more pervasive issue of loss of privacy.

Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA,7) and 15 cosponsors have offered H.R.1078, which would require the executive branch to create regulations to place limitations on the dissemination of Social Security numbers, but immediately goes on to say that those regulations are to be

no broader than necessary -

(A) to provide reasonable assurance that Social Security numbers and Social Security account numbers will not be used to commit or facilitate fraud, deception, or crime; and

(B) to prevent an undue risk of bodily, emotional, or financial harm to individuals. [emphasis added]

That is, instead of drawing the regulations in a way to maximize privacy while maintaining required functions, they are to be written so as to maximize the permissible uses for the information short of allowing crime or other harm.

Finally, there is H.R.82, the brainchild of Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ,11). It lacks the loopholes of the others, but is also the most limited in scope: It would ban online services from revealing anyone's Social Security number or "personally identifiable information which is identifiable to such individual by means of the individual's Social Security account number" without their prior, informed, written consent except where required by law or court order. Again, limited - but useful.

Rep. Joe Barton, [a] Texas Republican who happens to chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said last week that he plans to "outlaw the use of Social Security numbers for any purposes other than government purposes. ...

"The time has come to tip the balance in favor of individual privacy and find another way to help businesses determine the identity of the people they want to give credit to," Barton said....

If he comes through with a bill that actually does that, it would be, I think, the best of this lot. My own idea has for some time been that the use of Social Security numbers should be limited to uses directly related to Social Security, although I have been willing to stretch that to include federal taxes. That is, the only agencies that could use or have access to your Social Security number would be the Social Security Administration, the IRS, and such private enterprises as are required by law to make reports about you to the IRS, such as your employer or your bank. No other use - including by state tax agencies - would be permitted, no further distribution would be allowed, and it would not only be impermissible for other agencies or enterprises to have such information, it would be a criminal offense to even ask for it.

As McCullagh noted,

Barton's proposal, if enacted into law, would inconvenience companies that have inadvisably come to rely on SSNs to identify records in a database.

Frankly, corporate America, that's just too damn bad. Many other agencies and businesses don't use SSNs as identifiers and still others - such as, for one example I'm personally familiar with, the Massachusetts Division of Motor Vehicles - which used to use them have changed over to a new system. So you can, too. So stop whining: My privacy is not dependent on the whims of your convenience.

Footnote to both of the preceding

Again via the Iraqi Press Monitor, this time the June 2 edition, quoting the daily of the Al-Mada Institution for Media, Culture, and Arts:

In a new way of targeting Iraqi security forces, insurgents have distributed poisonous watermelons to police checkpoints, which resulted in the death of one officer. Nine others were taken to the hospital for treatment. A Defense Ministry official said an unknown seller driving a pick-up truck distributed the poisonous watermelons to six checkpoints.

I've been trying to think of some pithy, fitting remark but other than a bitter reference to "by their fruits ye shall know them" I haven't come up with anything.

Footnote to the preceding

In a development not widely covered in the US, at least insofar as I was aware, it was reported back on May 10 that

[t]he National Assembly [of Iraq] has formed a 55-member committee to draft the new constitution. The body includes 28 members from the United Iraqi Alliance, 15 from the Kurdistan Alliance, eight from the Iraqi List, and four members of other blocs... The committee is supposed to finish the drafting work within three months, and the document will go to referendum in the autumn.

That report, from al-Adala, the daily newspaper issued by the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq doesn't mention, for lack of necessity, what would be obvious to every Iraqi: The committee of 55 people includes at least 36 Shiites, 28 of those from religious parties.

Apparently aware of the implications both practical and political of freezing out of Sunnis, two weeks later,

Sheikh Humam Hamoodi, who heads the committee charged with writing a new constitution for Iraq, ... said Sunni groups which have not taken part in the political process so far will be invited to play a role in drafting the document, regardless of whether they are liberal or secular,

according to the independent Iraqi daily Addustour.

Echoing that, a week later

Adnan al-Dulaimi, the head of the Sunni Endowment, ... urged Sunnis to participate in the drafting of the constitution. He also said there would be a conference calling on Sunni groups to participate in writing the permanent constitution.

That from Baghdad, the daily of the Iraqi National Accord.

Three things emerge here: One, the Sunnis are still deeply suspicious of the government and of any participation in it, perhaps for fear of lending an aura of legitimacy to what many of them feel is an illegitimate government. Two, some are aware of the dangers presented by a constitutional committee consisting of at least 2/3 Shiites in total and a majority of Shiites from religious parties. And third, the combination of those two may be leading Iraq to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is not a good thing.

(All the links are to the Iraqi Press Monitor of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting.)

I can't help but wonder

The coalition of Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari ran in the January 30 election, as did others, on a platform of calling for a timetable for US withdrawal. Once elected, those coalitions started backpedaling on that and have been doing so ever since. Now, the shift of position has become more obvious than ever. First, the May 9 issue of the Iraqi Press Monitor, a project of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, quoted Al-Adala as reporting

President Jalal Talabani said in a May 9 statement that it was currently impossible to set a schedule for the withdrawal of United States troops, as Iraq still needed them to ward off any possible "foreign interference".

(Al-Adala is issued daily by the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI.) This despite the fact that just in April, Talabani was confidently predicting a US withdrawal "within two years." Then, just this week,

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari says he is worried that the US may pull its troops out before local forces are able to maintain security[, the BBC reported].

He told the UN Security Council that the US-led Multi-National Force should stay in the country until Iraqi forces were able to do the job themselves.

The thing is, this renewed determination to cast their lot with the US, which comes at the cost of increased cynicism not only among Sunnis but even among their own constituency, which is assuredly not crazy about the continued US presence, comes at a time when some US officials and others are becoming more and more downbeat about prospects there.

For example, Tony Karon, writing in Time magazine last week, notes that

[t]he International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) ... warned Wednesday that it would take five or six years before the Iraqi security forces being built by the U.S. were close to being capable of imposing and guaranteeing order in Iraq. Until then, Iraqi security would likely remain the responsibility of U.S. forces, meaning continued strain on U.S. military resources and, as things stand, limited prospects of prevailing against the insurgency for the foreseeable future. Indeed, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick conceded last Friday that the counterinsurgency war in Iraq could last a number of years.

Meanwhile, as I noted a couple of weeks ago, Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, says it's "too early" to predict when troops will come home, a sentiment also expressed by another senior officer, who suggested to the New York Times that U.S. military involvement could last "many years."

And all the while, more and more Americans are losing confidence in the possibility of "success" in Iraq as they come to realize that the invasion was the wrong thing to do. Even Congress is getting restive: On May 25, an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act offered in the House by Lynn Woolsey (D-CA,6) saying it's the sense of Congress that Bush should develop a plan for withdrawal and submit it to Congress got 128 votes. No, not a huge number - but it shows a base of support and the first resolutions calling for withdrawal from Vietnam fared even worse.

So to get back to the title of this piece, what I can't help but wonder is if the more frequent, more overt declarations by Iraqi officials of their dependence on the US are pre-emptive strikes in an attempt to head off something they and/or their White House underwriters are seeing which is as yet unclear to us, realizing which we have yet to grasp: The ground is shifting, the weight of public opinion is leaning in a different direction, the burden of proof, if you will, is moving from those who oppose the war to those who support it. That we are, as I said just the other day, winning:

[S]lowly, painfully, with too much blood shed and too many lives lost and too much hatred generated, but still, slowly - we are winning.

I'm not suggesting there is some sudden political earthquake about to happen, that next week the masses of oppressed humanity in this country are going to rise up in righteous indignation and throw off their warmonger overlords. But United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) is calling for three days of antiwar action in DC September 24-26, including a mass rally, interfaith services, and civil disobedience. I intend to be there, I hope you will be, too. Certainly I think it's time to get more dramatic in our opposition. And I do think it will be interesting to see what the next three-plus months bring in that direction.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
Who is John Denver?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
New York Stories for $400

Eloise lives in this New York City hotel.

Another question I'll be old before anyone asks

It appears that a good part of the reason the White House has refused to turn over to Congress documents relating to John Bolton's previous work for the administration is that they include the names of American companies involved in violations of export restrictions to China and others nations. Certainly, the "No CEO left behind" administration is not going to embarrass good, upstanding, American corporations! Instead,

the White House has said that Congress has "all the information it needs" to decide on Bolton's nomination...."

But then here's the question I'm still waiting for someone to ask: Who the flaming hell are they to decide that? Why does the White House, pushing for their boy, supposedly get to decide what information Congress needs to make a determination? They're not even saying it's irrelevant (which would be absurd), they're saying it's unnecessary. But since it clearly does relate to what Bolton has done and how he did it, it is just as clearly relevant and therefore it's entirely reasonable to want to see it. So why doesn't someone ask Shrub, why doesn't someone ask Scottie McMouthpiece, where the administration gets off declaring that it can on its own authority decide for Congress what is enough information?

I'm waiting....

Waddid I tell ya?

On several occasions I have raised questions about companies' gathering of personal customer data, saying I don't believe their crap about how it's all for our benefit and how it provides a "personalized shopping experience." Well, it turns out that while the first part is still crap, the second part allows for let's call it a creative interpretation. This is from AP for Tuesday:

Most American consumers don't realize Internet merchants and even traditional retailers sometimes charge different prices to different customers for the same products, according to a new survey.

The study, "Open to Exploitation," found nearly two-thirds of adult Internet users believed incorrectly it was illegal to charge different people different prices, a practice retailers call "price customization." More than two-thirds of people surveyed also said they believed online travel sites are required by law to offer the lowest airline prices possible.

The study, by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, also found that the vast majority of people objected to the practice even as they were unaware it was going on.

The point here is how do the companies pull this off? One way is those "customer loyalty cards," the ones that supposedly don't create a file on you but actually do. Another is that the internet

enables businesses to quietly collect detailed records about a customer's behavior and preferences and set prices accordingly. ...

[Researcher Joseph] Turow found a retail photography Web site charging different prices for the same digital cameras and related equipment depending on whether shoppers had previously visited popular price-comparison sites.

Which just serves to confirm what has been (or at least should have been) well-known: Unless you take steps to avoid it, you are being followed everywhere you go online, watched as you visit every website, click on every ad, go toe very link, make every purchase, conduct any business. When it comes to the internet, Big Brother is already here, but it's not the government doing the snooping. Big Brother is Big Business.

By the way, we are daily bombarded with ads that declare "Get you best price, then come here!" Or "Go ahead, shop around!" We are encouraged by ads to do comparison shopping. They drip with breathless respect for "today's sophisticated shopper." But would you care to know what businesses actually think of people who follow their (supposed) advice? "Bottom feeders." That's what the ad industry calls them. "Bottom feeders." And they are unwanted:

Stores aggressively try to retain loyal customers who generate the highest sales while discouraging bargain-hunter shoppers who are less profitable because they check many sites for the same product at the lowest price.

The net result is that the more you comparison shop online, the less likely you are to find bargains. Because Big Business Brother is watching.

Footnote: There are a number of freeware programs that can detect tracking programs on your computer. Used in tandem, they can be pretty effective in holding down the amount of information about your web habits that otherwise can be spewed all over cyberspace. While not the only ones by any means, the ones I use are Ad-Aware, Spybot - Search & Destroy, and Spyware Doctor. (The latter has limited functions in the freeware version.)

Have you Felt this way before?

Updated and Corrected I can't believe it. I can't believe they would even have the nerve to raise the question.

Hero or villain? For those who would judge former Deputy FBI Director Mark Felt, it's all in the eye of the beholder,

AP says.

No, it's not. It's in the facts. The cold, indisputable facts. A politically-corrupt administration that used everything from "dirty tricks" to intimidation to outright criminality in attempting to manipulate elections, suppress dissent, and smear opponents. A criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice, including suborning perjury and destruction of evidence. And Mark Felt, at the risk of his career (and a good deal more if he was uncovered, considering the people he was going up against), helped put an end to that. Mark Felt is a hero. Period. And it's outrageous that AP would even bother giving a hint, a breath, of credence to the self-interested boobs who want to say otherwise.

Oh, and what's the knock on Felt? He didn't go through channels. That's the complaint.

And just what the hell channels was he supposed to use? Who was he supposed to go to? His superior in the FBI, Director L. Patrick Gray, a Nixon loyalist who was implicated in the whole flaming mess? Gray's boss, Attorney General John Mitchell, who was in it up to his bushy eyebrows? To just who was he supposed to report to push for an investigation when the corruption of the chief investigators was exactly what needed investigating?

And who, ohmigosh who, has the AP and in another article, AFP, scraped from under the pier to spit at Felt? Why, it's a regular regiment of rectitudinous Republicans! Check it out:

- Racist xenophobe Pat Buchanan called Felt a "snake" and a "traitor."

- Watergate felon Chuck Colson described Felt as "sneaking in dark alleys."

- Fellow Watergate jailbird G. Gordon Liddy said Felt "violated the ethics of the law enforcement profession," the same profession, one gathers, whose members he once advised his listeners on how to kill. He also passed judgment on what Felt was "honor bound" to do, which, basically, was to keep his mouth shut.

- GOPerative Greg Mueller accused Felt of "a personal vendetta" that helped fell "a president who was fighting the Cold War."

- Nixon mouthpiece Len Garment called Felt "dishonorable."

Yes, that's certainly a crew fit to discuss matters of honesty and honor.

Now, let it be noted that there are those who say that, yes, personal matters played a part; supposedly Felt was very upset at being passed over for the top spot in the FBI. I don't care!

It's also been suggested that his family pushed him into revealing his role because they hope to make money on it. I don't care!

Felt was convicted and later pardoned for being involved in illegal FBI breakins related to the Weather Underground. About that I do care - but it is not relevant the the issue at hand!

Mark Felt is a genuine American hero, a whistleblower extraordinaire, a man who saw wrongdoing and, knowing that "regular channels" would accomplish nothing, took risks to get that information out and help get that wrongdoing undone. That is what honorable people are supposed to do and for having done it, he deserves our thanks and our praise.

"This is basically a battle over history and a battle over truth," Buchanan said.

You got it, bozo. And you lost.

I say it again: Mark Felt is a hero. Period.

Updated with the bit about Felt's conviction and the last Buchanan quote.

Correction: When Felt started providing information to Bob Woodward, Mitchell had already resigned at Attorney General to take over the Committee to Re-Elect the President, accurately acronymed CREEP. But he was still influential at the White House and his successor, Richard Kleindienst, was also of let's be kind and call it questionable impartiality and wound up resigning along with H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and John Dean.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
What is Canada?

JEOPARDY!
Military Brats for $1000

He grew up in an air force family, so it made sense to write "Leavin' on a Jet Plane."

Tonight

Tonight has been a night off from blogging. Y'see, tomorrow is our second anniversary - yeah, two, so if anyone wants to provide some cotton or throw some china our way, feel free.

Wait, that didn't come out right....

Anyway, the point here is that I have to work tomorrow night so we made tonight the anniversary night, which took priority over everything else. Yep, including you.

Still, she usually falls asleep a couple of hours before I do (I'm a night owl from 'way back) so maybe something will appear overnight. We'll just have to see - unless, of course, you read the blog from the top down, in which case you already know.