Good thing he doesn't pay attention to polls
Because this one would really hurt President Bush's feelings.
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June 30, 2005
The plot thickens
I don't know who's telling the truth about the CIA's apparent "extraordinary rendition" of Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr from Italy to Egypt, where he evidently was tortured. According to four veterans of the service, the CIA -- which has officially refused to comment -- had gotten the permission of the Italian government.
Now the Italian government denies any prior knowledge of the rendition. The leader of Italy's Communist Refoundation Party bites the bullet and defends the CIA version, making the eminently plausible argument that ""Obviously, they cannot admit this because it violates the Constitution, Italian laws and international treaties."
Which raises the question: what happens if the people of one of America's most important allies actually demand that the government follows international and domestic law? It's kind of a radical notion, and terrifying to contemplate.
June 29, 2005
I'm not from Boston, but...
Siva's obviously fine handling this on his own, but there's something else about Santorum's ugly charges that I'd like to add. As Andrew Sullivan notes, the disgusting protest by a small group of fundamentalist Christians from Kansas at the military funeral of Massachusetts soldier was motivated not by the soldier's homosexuality (he wasn't gay), but rather because Massachusetts allows same-sex marriages, part of the subtext of Santorum's lunacy. For the record, as Sullivan points out, the leader of the protest is a fundamentalist Democrat, not Republican
Responding to Santorum's diatribe with any sort of logic -- involving the history of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, or the highly conservative social climate of Boston when many of the sex scandals took place, or anything of the sort -- seems beside the point. What would be better, however, would be for Catholic Republican senators like Mike DeWine, Lisa Murkowski, and Pete Domenici to condemn Santorum's smear. The Democratic Catholics shouldn't need any prodding.
I think what offends me most -- as a lapsed Catholic whose eyes still get moist at some of the more beautiful teachings of my family's faith -- is Santorum's stunning arrogance and dishonesty about his religion. His own sudden "rethinking" of the death penalty, for example, conveniently follows opinion polls showing public uncertainty about it, not any change in Catholic teaching, and not reflecting anything in Santorum's actual voting record. Similarly, Santorum's defense of Guantanamo flies in the face of virtually every Catholic teaching about "just war" doctrine.
So I'm ranting here. But because Santorum is so quick to point to the crucifix he's evidently carrying up to Golgotha, let me suggest that he read a letter he might like, from St. Ignatius Loyola (founder of the Jesuits), the Letter to Members of the Society in Portugal. It's a letter about "perfect obedience," a topic that Santorum, with his creepy fixation on stamping out any deviance from his own subliterate understanding of moral doctrine, would probably like. But he might want to focus on where St. Ignatius approvingly quotes St. Bernard:
Whoever endeavors either openly or covertly to have his spiritual father enjoin him what he himself desires, deceives himself if he flatters himself as a true follower of obedience. For in that he does not obey his superior, but rather the superior obeys him.
Note: this is a controversial letter, one promoting the much-debated idea of "blind obedience." And before anyone writes to me to point out that I'm misinterpreting the letter, quite possibly; I didn't do all that well in my CCD classes. It might be worth looking at a more informed view of St. Ignatius's recognition of the differences between disobedience and dissent. In his own selective use of Catholic doctrine, Santorum is not offering a challenge to or a rethinking of Catholic doctrine; this isn't dissent. This is the faith's employment to fit his political agenda. And so before the really angry comments start, let me ask, is Santorum really a guy you want to defend? After this letter?
I couldn't care less what Santorum thinks about academia, Boston, or anything else. But when he -- as someone who conveniently ignores Catholic teaching when it differs from conservative American dogma -- invokes it in yet another vile attempt to divide America, I tend to get a little irked. I'm far from a great Catholic. By many standards, I'm not even a good one. But at least I don't spend my time making hideous use of my religious background in my political statements, simultaneously providing moral cover to the perpetrators of terrible crimes against children, erroneously drawing a causal connection where none exists, and peddling metaphysical fears to those more imperiled by his execrable legislative record than by anything the people in Boston might be doing. We're all sinners, and I would never be so arrogant as to suggest that he's a bad Catholic (which would imply that he's a worse one than I am, and that I know the mind of God and can judge him to be so). But I'm certain that he's a terrible servant of the American people.
Update: Sorry -- just edited for a little clarity.
Scalia's Jewish Problem
From Altercation:
Name: David A SnyderHometown: Edison, NJ
Dr. Vaidhyanathan (and Dr. Alterman, too),
Actually, Justice Scalia's position on the meaning of the 10 Commandments is not, as I, a liberal Jew, understand the Jewish position. Justice Scalia claims: "All of them, moreover (Islam included), believe that the Ten Commandments were given by God to Moses, and are divine prescriptions for a virtuous life." Jews, who do not consider non-Jews (many of whom are quite virtuous) obligated to follow such practices as the Sabbath, certainly do not feel the 10 Commandments to be necessary prescriptions for leading a virtuous life. Moreover, we feel that we Jews (alas, not all of us virtuous) are obligated to follow not 10, but 613 commandments, so the 10 Commandments are hardly sufficient for prescribing a virtuous life. From a Jewish point of view, about which Scalia acts as if he knows so much, what Scalia has said is nonsense if not blasphemy. To have a Supreme Court ruling, the law of the land, based on a religious opinion as to the meaning of a religious document, an opinion which some would find skirting the line of blasphemy would hardly respect the free exercise of religion -- it is a good thing that this was merely a dissent rather than a ruling, then.
As a Jew, I am tired of Christians speaking for my beliefs as if we are some subsidiary of their faith. We Jews do not feel that the 10 Commandments are mere suggestions to be posted everywhere because they sound good, but are part of a religious contract with God obligating us to 613 classes of obligations. For people who don't observe the Sabbath (so who's going to be the first to put Scalia to a religious test and ask him if he observes the Sabbath -- and assuming he doesn't, ask him whether, since he is breaking one of the 10 Commandments, how he can be virtuous), who are very blithe about taking oaths to the point where they risk taking God's name in vain, etc., to insist that the 10 Commandments be represented in graven images everywhere is nothing short of idolatry. When Jews, Muslims and secular folk treat Christian symbols so carelessly, we are accused of being anti-Christian. Does this make Justice Scalia and others who offend me as a Jew by being so quick to celebrate graven images of a document they don't really follow anti-Semites?
Finally, I may be accused of being anti-Christian myself here, but if Christians, who believe in the Trinity are monotheists, are not Hindus, who also believe in a fundamental unity of the Divine, also monotheists?
Who is to blame for the Priestly molestations?
According to Sen. Rick Santorum, I am responsible:
It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning "private" moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.
Hmmm. Actually, now that I think about it, Melissa is much more responsible for all the pain and suffering than I am. After all, she is from Boston.
On behalf of my family of liberal professors, I apologize for all the harm we have caused.
I am sure the new pope will jump to defend and forgive us. He's that kind of guy.
W's immoral relativism
From Tom Englehardt:
In his speeches, George Bush regularly calls for a return to or the reinforcement of traditional, even eternal, family values and emphasizes the importance of personal "accountability" for our children as well as ourselves. ("The culture of America is changing from one that has said, if it feels good, do it, and if you've got a problem, blame somebody else, to a new culture in which each of us understands we are responsible for the decisions we make in life.")And yet when it comes to acts that are clearly wrong in this world -- aggressive war, the looting of resources, torture, personal gain at the expense of others, lying, and manipulation among other matters -- Bush and his top officials never hesitate to redefine reality to suit their needs. When faced with matters long defined in everyday life in terms of right and wrong, they simply reach for their dictionaries.
You want to invade a country not about to attack you. No problem, just pick up that Webster's and rename the act "preventive war." Now, you want an excuse for such a war that might actually panic the public into backing it. So you begin to place mushroom clouds from nonexistent enemy atomic warheads over American cities (Condoleezza Rice: "[W]e don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."); you begin to claim, as our President and other top officials did, that nonexistent enemy UAVs (Unmanned Airborne Vehicles) launched from nonexistent ships off our perfectly real East coast, might spray nonexistent biological or chemical weapons hundreds of miles inland, and -- Voila! -- you're ready to strike back.
You sweep opponents up on a battlefield, but you don't want to call them prisoners of war or deal with them by the established rules of warfare. No problem, just grab that dictionary and label them "unlawful combatants," then you can do anything you want. So you get those prisoners into your jail complex (carefully located on an American base in Cuba, which you have redefined as being legally under "Cuban sovereignty," so that no American court can touch them); and then you declare that, not being prisoners of war, they do not fall under the Geneva Conventions, though you will treat them (sort of) as if they did and, whatever happens, you will not actually torture them, though you plan to take those "gloves" off. Then your lawyers and attorneys retire to some White House or Justice Department office and, under the guidance of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales (now Attorney General), they grab those dictionaries again and redefine torture to be whatever we're not doing to the prisoners. (In a 50-page memo written in August 2002 for the CIA and addressed to Alberto Gonzales, Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, now an Appeals Court judge, hauled out many dictionaries and redefined torture this way: "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.") And if questioned on the subject, after emails from FBI observers at the prison lay out the various acts of abuse and torture committed in grisly detail, the Vice President simply insists, as he did the other day, that those prisoners are living the good life in the balmy "tropics." ("They're well fed. They've got everything they could possibly want. There isn't any other nation in the world that would treat people who were determined to kill Americans the way we're treating these people.")
And speaking of reaching for the dictionaries, here is Tom Delay denying that the pending Congressional pay increase is a pay increase:
"It's not a pay raise," said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas. "It's an adjustment so that they're not losing their purchasing power."
Why "Fighting Terrorists there instead of here" is morally as well and tactically corrupt
Apparently, Iraqis are not so happy about being used as flypaper.
Grateful in the main for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, many are dismayed by what they see as heavy-handed tactics and a failure by the U.S. occupiers to prevent Iraq becoming a new haven for foreign Islamists in the chaos that followed Saddam. "Why don't they find another place to fight terrorism?" asked Abdul Ridha al-Hafadhi, 58, head of a humanitarian aid group.
These are the next great leaders of the Republican Party
As Max Blumenthal reports on College Republicans:
By the time I encountered Cory Bray, a towering senior from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, the beer was flowing freely. "The people opposed to the war aren't putting their asses on the line," Bray boomed from beside the bar. Then why isn't he putting his ass on the line? "I'm not putting my ass on the line because I had the opportunity to go to the number-one business school in the country," he declared, his voice rising in defensive anger, "and I wasn't going to pass that up."
The whole story is scary/hilarious.
How bad is the VA situation?
Why do Republicans hate the troops?
Here is Michael Froomkin's take on the situation, with a link to a great NPR story in which Sen. Patty Murray makes VA chief Nicholson gag on his lies and duplicity. It would be hilarious, if our soldiers and their families were not suffering so much because of Republican incompetence.
Turns out Sen. Murray proposed adding a couple million more to the VA appropriations last time the Iraq funding bill came up. The VA and the White House blocked it.
Putin Steals Superbowl Ring
Now, Vladimir Putin may be someone W thinks he can work with. After all, W "looked into his soul" and found the KGB-trained tyrant to be a decent fellow.
But apparently, Putin has no problem with stealing Patriots owner Bob Kraft's Superbowl ring, just like his partners have looted the wealth of his nation.
UT President Larry Faulkner to Resign
This is unfortunate. Larry was one of the best presidents that university has ever had. He was a scientist, and alumn, and he bled burnt orange.
He was a hell of a fundraiser and could discuss sports, politics, medicine, and literature in the same conversation.
At least he is leaving with a National Championship in baseball to bid him farewell!
Conservatives see through W's blather as well
At least Matt LaBash does. Check him out:
Now, the most fashionable pre-fab rationalization to use when the news isn't going as swimmingly as we want it to, is to select a place in Iraq, then a corresponding place in America. If the two places start with the same letter, all the better. Next, state baldly that no matter how lousy things are going, you'd rather fight the terrorists / Baathists / whoever-it-is-we're-fighting in the first location, rather than the second. Lastly, sit back with a self-satisfied smile, as if that settles the matter.So, for instance, Paul Bremer would "rather have us fighting [terrorists] somewhere outside the United States, than fighting them inside the United States." President Bush is spoiling for a fight "in Iraq and Afghanistan and in other places" rather than in "New York or St. Louis or Los Angeles." Still confused? Bush states it more simply: he'd rather fight them, "there than here."
MORE CLOYING, however, is the tendency of Those Who Would Rather Fight to want to fight the terrorists in places that begin with the same letter as the places they don't want to fight, thus making their formulations annoyingly alliterative, like a bad Maureen Dowd column. The Boston Herald, for instance, wants to fight in Baghdad, "rather than mopping up after mayhem in Boston." A Fox commentator prefers "the Middle East so you won't have to fight them in the Midwest." New York governor George Pataki wants our troops fighting the terrorists "on the streets of Baghdad," rather than our firefighters fighting them "on the streets of Brooklyn." Representative J.D. Hayworth would rather "see the fight in Tikrit than in Tucson or Tacoma." And Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld scores a fighting hat trick, since he'd prefer the fight to go down in Baghdad rather than "in Boston or in Baltimore or Boise." Senator Kit Bond does Rumsfeld one better, wishing the fight to commence in Baghdad, "rather than Boston or Boise or Baldwin, Missouri, or Belton, Missouri."
... IT'S SIMPLE REALLY, to know where you'd rather fight the terrorists. It's considerably harder to fight them. Which is why this hoary cliché needs to be retired once and for all. For there's two things to keep in mind when declaring where in Iraq you'd rather fight the terrorists.
The first, is that we're not altogether sure we are fighting terrorists, in the al-Qaeda sense of the word. As Newsweek recently reported in a piece entitled "War In the Dark," "what the Americans don't know is who, exactly, they're fighting." In a week in which four suicide-bombing attacks in Baghdad killed more than 30 people, one general told reporters "that the attacks were the work of 'foreign fighters.' Yet just 24 hours earlier his division commander . . . told a news conference that he had not seen 'any infusion of foreign fighters in Baghdad.'" A recent Washington Post story reported that at one Baghdad briefing, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, in the dark himself as to the identity of the guerillas, said that 90 percent of the fighters the U.S. had killed or captured were Hussein loyalists or Iraqi religious militants--and only 10 percent were freelancers from abroad. Meaning that, according to his calculations, there's a decent chance that if we weren't fighting these particular terrorists in Babylon, we wouldn't be fighting them in Bakersfield.
The second thing to remember, for most of the people declaring where they'd rather fight the terrorists, is that they are not personally doing much of the fighting. Who's to say if you were coming up on the 11th month of your deployment in a hostile country where the natives, instead of showing gratitude, showed you the business-end of an RPG-launcher, that you might not enjoy fighting the terrorists in a place where you could claim home-field advantage, have a warm bed, a cold beer, and the occasional conjugal visit from a woman whose name you could pronounce.
For it is the luxury of those who talk about fighting, rather than of those who fight, to dispense smiley faces and silver linings. In the November 24th New Yorker, in a piece entitled "War After the War--What Washington Doesn't See in Iraq," George Packer writes in a painful reminder from Baghdad, "All the soldiers suffer from the stress of heat, long days, lack of sleep, homesickness, the constant threat of attack . . . and the simple fact that there are nowhere near enough of them to do the tasks they've been given."
Not to mention the fact that nearly 200 of them have been killed since major combat operations ended. Fight the terrorists where you will. But it's probably best to avoid diminishing the sacrifice of soldiers, by burying them with respectful silence, rather than with idiotic clichés.
In other words, W's reason number three for this sad debacle of a war is losing credibility already, even on the right.
Ok. What do you think reason number four will be? Let's start a pool.
Helping Military Families
Jeff suggested these sites. I will post some of them on the right side of this page ASAP.
This one looks very comprehensive:
http://www.familyfirst.net/famlife/military.asp
This one looks direct and on point:
http://www.adusa.com/FamNeeds.htm
And this one is run by Veterans of Foreign Wars. I think this one is my favorite. It helps that it is affiliated with such a venerable organization:
Jeff also reminds us to donate to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. They do a lot of work with children in need:
Thanks, Jeff. And thanks to everyone in advance for donating time and money to military families.
What W got right last night
1. We can't pull out from Iraq because it's the center of anti-American terrorism in the world. Yes it is. Of course, an honest man would have admitted that he made it so. It's way too much to expect this guy to ever tell the truth about his own blunders.
2. We can't issue a time-table for withdrawal because that would be counterproductive and invite the insurgents to wait it out. This is no duh. Anyone who demands withdrawal by a certain date or any sort of time-based scale-down is not helping the situation at all. We are going to be there for a long, long time. Many more thousands of American soldiers will die for this mistake and for W's hubris. And we are just going to have to deal with that. There is no easy escape. There are no easy answers. And no, "we will stand down when the Iraqis stand up" is not a policy. It's a platitude. Of course, W has never known the difference.
3. This war was never about weapons or Iraqi freedom. Ok. W did not really admit this openly. But his new and improved third rational -- this war is about Al Queda -- pushes the other two aside. We are now on to reason number three because reason number one was a lie and reason number two is not polling well. So let's bring out OSAMA! We can't find him, which serves W well. If Osama had been captured or killed in 2002 when he was supposed to have been, he never could have shown up on TV four days before the election, thus throwing it to W. I tell you, this guy would be nothing without good ol' Osama. When things are bad, remind people of the attack you would not act to prevent and have done nothing about. W has given Osama everything he has ever wanted: W got rid of Osama's nemisis Saddam; W used the word "crusade" (doh!); W launched an illegal an unwarranted attack on a country with many Moslem holy sites; W pulled troops out of Saudi Arabia; W openly supported Ariel Sharon; W continues to support Osama's benefactors in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. What would Osama be without W?
4. We all must sacrifice for the greater good of the nation. Ok. Sorry. He did not say this either. One might expect a president immersed in a protracted war to ask for patriotic sacrifice. But he does not know the meaning of the word. Remember when, right after 9/11, he urged people to keep on shopping and Cheney assured us that we need not reduce the amount of fuel we consumed? This would be a cost-free war, he promised. Remember how it was going to last a few months and we would be greeted as liberators? With flowers?
For W, there is never cause to sacrifice. His entire life and career are about having it all and giving back nothing:
Tax cuts for the wealthy AND a recession;
Massive federal spending on Republican businesses AND massive deficits that our children will have to pay off so that his rich friends can get richer;
A booming yellow ribbon magnet market AND cuts in veterans' benefits;
Massive public spending to build his baseball stadium in Arlington AND a fraudulent reputation as a free-market champion;
No Child Left Behind as a slogan yet no money to fund it, thus leaving millions of children behind;
An open-ended and amorphous "war on terror" that results in a massive increase in worldwide terror AND a fraudulent reputation as someone who can actually fight such a war;
A declaration that his administration will treat prisoners humanely AND a refusal to obey the laws that require it to treat prisoners humanely;
A verbal commitment to democracy and human rights AND massive and unqualified support for brutal dictators in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan;
A call from daddy the Congressman to get him into the Air National Guard so he would not have to actually serve his country in a time of war (one that he supported) AND a way to escape prosecution for desertion once that joke of a commitment proved too hard to fulfill.
Wait. I could go on. But I realize now that W DID say something last night that asks for us all to give of ourselves:
"This 4th of July, I ask you to find a way to thank the men and women defending our freedom, by flying the flag, sending letters to our troops in the field or helping the military family down the street."
Ok. Except we fly the flag on July 4 anyway. So that's no big deal. Many of us fly the flag on other days as well. This, despite what Republicans may want you to believe, is not a great sacrifice. It really costs very little. And it accomplishes even less.
Letter to our troops? Guess what. We have been doing that for three years as well. Again, that's a little time and a little postage. It's important. And we must continue to do it. But it ain't saving toothpaste tubes.
Helping the military family down the street. Now there is something worth asking us to do. We have had soldiers in battle overseas for three years now. These families have been suffering mightily. Thousands are on food stamps.
Yet whenever Democrats have proposed increases in relief programs or veterans benefits, the Bush administration has shot them down. And whenever members of our reserve forces think their terms of service are over, he calls them up again.
Let's face it, folks. W, who has no relatives currently serving in the armed forces, is not going to do anything to help these families. It's up to us.
Anyone know of any good charities that offer direct aid to military families in need? Give me a good link and I will include it in those on the right side of this page.
June 28, 2005
How Bad are things in Iraq?
You won't find out from our lazy, conservative media organizations.
But Israelis know what's up. They have to. Check out this article from Haaretz.
... The celebrations surrounding the formation of a new government were almost immediately tempered by some very disquieting data: Close to 700 people have been killed since the government was established, and more dead are added to the list every day. This week came a glimmer of hope for some sort of turning point, when insurgency leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose organization appears to be behind most of the terror attacks, was reported to have been seriously wounded. Several Internet sites even reported that a replacement had been appointed, but the reports have since changed.Evidently, Zarqawi is still running things and even if he were killed, his organization seems to have a broad enough infrastructure to be able to continue with the terror campaign. The show of force by the Iraqi security forces - about 40,000 Iraqi police and soldiers raided Baghdad neighborhoods in a "lightning" operation - did yield many arrests, but the bombings have not abated.
The shortfall in income from oil, combined with the frequent terror attacks, will force the American administration this year again to pour several tens of billions of dollars into Iraq to keep the country's rehabilitation going. But the rehabilitation efforts apparently are not taking off, and not only because of the bombings. This week, the Kurdish newspaper Al-Ahli, published in Iraq, reported that Kuwaiti companies that won key tenders to rebuild the water network and to install electricity power stations have been unable to start working because of corruption and an excess of bureaucratic regulations. ...
... The full extent of the institutionalized corruption under American rule, and now under the rule of the new Iraqi government, may never be known. Investigators are not going out into the field to scrutinize data because it would mean risking their lives, and the ministers in the new Iraqi government have been appointing cronies to ensure loyalty. ...
Don't worry. The President says despite all this destruction and failure, "it's worth it."
Click below to read the whole story. It's scary. Let's see if Bush talks about this stuff tonight.
Why isn't Iraq getting on its feet?By Zvi Bar'el
Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum isn't surprised. The new Iraqi oil minister, who earned his doctorate in petroleum engineering at New Mexico Tech, is familiar with the giant oil tanker method. Each tanker holds about 50 tons of oil and is filled within a few days, then transferred to the Shatt al-Arab waterway and from there to the designated ports. Except that this isn't oil that is being exported by the Iraqi government in order to bring in money. It's oil that is being systematically smuggled from Iraq to other countries in the region.
The method is simple. You pierce a hole in one of the oil pipelines, siphon off oil into tankers and transfer it from there to the giant tanks. This is the system in the south of the country, close to the ports. In the north, the system is more destructive. There, they blow up the oil pipelines that carry the oil from Kirkuk to the port of Jihan in Turkey. It takes a long time to repair the pipeline and instead of carrying about 800,000 barrels per day, right now it can only carry 100,000 at most. About 1,500 people are guarding its 480-kilometer span, but they do not have enough equipment, they are poorly trained and have a limited number of vehicles at their disposal, so they are not capable of preventing sabotage operations.
The result is ruinous for the Iraqi economy. Before the war, the forecast was that Iraq would be able to sell about 3 million barrels a day; now, two years on, it is exporting less than 2 million barrels. In the past year, this brought into the country about $17 billion. In the first third of the present year, Iraq sold about $7 billion worth of oil - much less than anticipated and very far from meeting the country's needs. Approximately $100 billion is needed to restore Iraq's infrastructure in almost every area. But the shortage of money is actually the "easy" problem.
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The celebrations surrounding the formation of a new government were almost immediately tempered by some very disquieting data: Close to 700 people have been killed since the government was established, and more dead are added to the list every day. This week came a glimmer of hope for some sort of turning point, when insurgency leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose organization appears to be behind most of the terror attacks, was reported to have been seriously wounded. Several Internet sites even reported that a replacement had been appointed, but the reports have since changed.
Evidently, Zarqawi is still running things and even if he were killed, his organization seems to have a broad enough infrastructure to be able to continue with the terror campaign. The show of force by the Iraqi security forces - about 40,000 Iraqi police and soldiers raided Baghdad neighborhoods in a "lightning" operation - did yield many arrests, but the bombings have not abated.
The shortfall in income from oil, combined with the frequent terror attacks, will force the American administration this year again to pour several tens of billions of dollars into Iraq to keep the country's rehabilitation going. But the rehabilitation efforts apparently are not taking off, and not only because of the bombings. This week, the Kurdish newspaper Al-Ahli, published in Iraq, reported that Kuwaiti companies that won key tenders to rebuild the water network and to install electricity power stations have been unable to start working because of corruption and an excess of bureaucratic regulations.
"The Iraqi system" compels the representatives of these companies to add an Iraqi partner to each tender - to whom about 40 percent of the value of the tender must be paid in return for his ability "to move things along." Iraqi bureaucrats also require the Kuwaiti companies to purchase products from Iraqi companies, even if they have no need for them. But even after such bribes have been paid, there's always another permit or document missing, with the result being that the projects do not progress.
The idea of trying to sue the Iraqis responsible is not being given serious consideration. No one wants to risk his life by having to go to the heart of Baghdad to pursue legal proceedings. The parties conduct most of their business meetings in neighboring countries like Jordan, Iran and Syria. And the results are evident in Iraq. The most widespread complaint seen in letters to the editor in the Iraqi press is about the lack of water and electricity or, in the best case, about how the water that does reach the houses has a terrible odor. In some quarters of Baghdad, the municipality is still supplying drinking water in tanks.
But it's not just the Iraqi bureaucrats who are holding up projects. A report by a Congressional oversight committee reveals that during the period in which the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was in control, before it transferred sovereignty to the Iraqi government last June, many projects were going on without proper oversight. One suspicion is that the former prime minister, Iyad Allawi, hid large sums whose final destination remains unknown. The amount of money in question is at least $100 million. Another example of apparent theft was described in a hearing before the Senate committee investigating the functioning of the CPA in Iraq. According to testimony from Franklin Willis, a former CPA official, the Custer Battles security company may have forged accounts, hid funds and been paid millions of dollars for work that was never carried out.
The full extent of the institutionalized corruption under American rule, and now under the rule of the new Iraqi government, may never be known. Investigators are not going out into the field to scrutinize data because it would mean risking their lives, and the ministers in the new Iraqi government have been appointing cronies to ensure loyalty.
As for the big question: When will the United States be able to get out of Iraq? - no one in the American administration is willing to talk. "We're examining the situation every day, every week and every month," an American diplomat posted to a country neighboring Israel told Haaretz. "It wouldn't be wise to start talking about a timetable when the Iraqi government itself still isn't stable and when the military force at its disposal is still in its infancy."
Two weeks ago, U.S. President George W. Bush announced proudly that the Iraqi force is now bigger than the American force in Iraq. But in this case, size is not what matters. The Iraqi military capability is far from sufficient and ethnic militias are already starting to take shape. This is not confined to the Kurdish army, the Peshmarga, which obeys only its Kurdish commanders and political leaders. In fact, every political faction seems to have its own private militia, and political coordination is faltering, too.
This week, the parliament appointed a constitution committee whose task is to formulate a permanent constitution for Iraq that will be presented in a national referendum in October. The size and composition of the committee may be indicative of the difficulties it will face. It has 55 members, including 28 Shi'ites, 15 Kurds, eight members of Iyad Allawi's party and four members who represent the Yazidi Christians and the Communists.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "recommended" that the parliament and government add some Sunni members to the committee since, she believes, it won't be possible to stamp out the terror without Sunni cooperation. In fact, it also will not be possible to formulate a constitution without the Sunnis. But there is very deep distrust, among the Sunnis themselves and of course between the Sunnis and the Shi'ites and the Kurds.
Witty columnist Saman Nuh of the Al-Ahli newspaper recently wrote about the conflicts between the Sunnis and Shi'ites regarding cooperation in the government, saying that now the Sunnis are accusing the Shi'ites of harming their mosques while the Shi'ites are accusing the Sunnis of cozying up to the terror organizations. "Thanks to the wonders of politics, one side [the Sunnis - Z.B.] that aspires to a share of power is seeking the role of mediator in the conflict between the Sunnis and the Shi'ites. This side says that it wants to reach a solution via a return to rationality. The odd thing is that, just a few weeks ago, one of the leaders of the side now offering its mediation services threatened the government with an all-out attack if its prisoners being held by the Americans were not freed. May Allah help the Americans deal with the contradictions, madness and difficulties they encounter in Iraqi society."
Nuh talks about the announcement by Sunni religious sages of a three-day closing of the mosques as a protest against an attack on the mosques by the Badr Brigades Shi'ite militia. "Some of the mosques have already moved from the stage in which they were only centers for political preaching and recruitment centers for one of the rival parties to a new stage in which they also serve as weapons arsenals. Will the next stage be that they serve as launching pads for a holy war against Israel via Najaf?"
Hagel to Vets: Why we are losing the war
Of course, I think Bush lost the war long ago when he lost most of this country's potential allies and all of his credibility as a champion of truth and justice. Bush created the conditions for rebellion, humiliation, misery, and civil war by being untruthful, manipulative, and stubborn. Many people in his administration warned him to send enough troops to secure the peace, prepare for an uprising, protect the electricity and water systems, and ignore the corrupt platitudes of Chalabi. Those who told him the truth were fired and ignored. Those who worked with him to fail so spectacularly have been retained or promoted (or honored, like the former CIA chief who screwed up so badly on all fronts). The smartest people in his administration, of course, told him the real enemy was lauging at us from the hills of Pakistan while Bush was obsessing over an unarmed, harmless petty dictator whose country had been contained for more than a decade. They told him the war on terror would be harmed by his folly in Iraq. And they were right.
The incompetence of this administration is breathtaking. American soldiers are paying the price for it every day (while eating spoiled food thanks to the Vice President's company). Shameful. Shameful.
Chuck Hagel seems to be the only Republican left who is armed with a brain, a heart, and courage. Here is what he said to veterans in his home state:
Hagel sounds alarm over IraqBY JAKE THOMPSON
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITERGRAND ISLAND, Neb. - More than 200 Nebraska American Legion members, who have seen war and conflict themselves, fell quiet here Saturday as Sen. Chuck Hagel bluntly explained why he believes that the United States is losing the war in Iraq.
Sen. Chuck Hagel addresses more than 200 Nebraska American Legion members in Grand Island on Saturday.
It took 20 minutes, but it boiled down to this:
The Bush team sent in too few troops to fight the war leading to today's chaos and rising deaths of Americans and Iraqis. Terrorists are "pouring in" to Iraq.
Basic living standards are worse than a year ago in Iraq. Civil war is perilously close to erupting there. Allies aren't helping much. The American public is losing its trust in President Bush's handling of the conflict.
And Hagel's deep fear is that it will all plunge into another Vietnam debacle, prompting Congress to force another abrupt pullout as it did in 1975.
"What we don't want to happen is for this to end up another Vietnam," Hagel told the legionnaires, "because the consequences would be catastrophic."
It would be far worse than Vietnam, says Hagel, a twice-wounded veteran of that conflict, which killed 58,000 Americans.
Let's see who makes a better case: the President who has lied about everything from the start and never served his country or a decorated veteran who can't help but tell the truth.
Tune in tonight and find out!
More Wealth Distribution
As usual, it's from working people to rich people.
These Republicans love paying their friends with our money, especially if they can do it while ensuring we are addicted to petroleum for as long as possible.
UPDATE: The Vice President's company, Halliburton, is not only stealing from us, it's poisoning our troops.
In addition, Rory Mayberry, a former KBR food manager at Camp Anaconda in Iraq, testified on videotape from Baghdad that the company charged for twice the number of meals it provided and served food beyond its expiration date. He said managers ordered workers to pick bullets and shrapnel out of food shipments that had been damaged by gunfire or bombings and serve it to troops.
95 Theses vs. the Religious Right
From philosopher/law professor Brian Leiter's blog:
Philosopher Peter Ludlow (Michigan) writes:"Here's something you may not have known or suspected. When I grew up my family went to a conservative Christian church and I subsequently went to a Swedish Baptist college in Minnesota. I recently went back to my home town and was sickened by what became of the family church over the last 20 years. The received view is that the conservative christians have taken over the Republican Party. I think the reverse happened. The right wing of the Republican Party has taken over the church. Nothing could be more clear to me. In a fit of revulsion, and with a nod to Marty Luther, I wrote up the following 95 theses on the relighous right ... In lieu of nailing it to the door of the Wittenburg Church I'm sending it to you instead. Not exactly the same thing, I realize. I'm not saying I'm a believer and I'm not saying I'm not, but I am saying that what has happened to the fundamentalist church is revolting."
Click below to read most of them. Or check out Brian's blog to get an RTF file with the theses.
Philosopher Peter Ludlow (Michigan) writes:Here are a few of the theses:
1. Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said "love thy neighbor", willed that believers should show *compassion* toward others.
2. This word cannot be understood to mean mere lip service ("I love them, but I hate their sin"), but genuine concern for the welfare of others.
3. Yet the Religious Right has forsaken compassion for a doctrine of institutionalized hatred and violence.
4. Specifically, the Religious Right has taken the Word of God and wrapped it in the flag of Right Wing Politics, replacing God's message of redemption for the entire world with a narrow message endorsing right wing American politics.
5. Item: the Religious Right has neglected the teachings of Jesus in the gospel of Luke, where He instructs that we are to show compassion for the poor.
6. In place of God's words, the Religious Right has substituted a right wing political doctrine in which the poor have only themselves and their alleged laziness and moral weakness to blame.
7. For example, the Religious Right has rejected the needs of poor children of unwed mothers.
8. The Religious Right has rejected the cries for help from the children of impoverished families in the inner cities.
9. The Religious Right, has advocated fewer resources for the elderly poor and for the millions of children now living in poverty.
10. In place of giving to the poor, the Religious Right has advocated political doctrines specifically designed so that individuals may acquire vast sums of money.
11. The Religious Right has thus seized on a contemporary economic ideology as an excuse to ignore the teachings of Jesus.
...
18. Item: the Religious Right has neglected the teachings of Jesus that "he who is without sin should cast the first stone."
19. In place of God's words, the Religious Right has substituted a doctrine in which perceived sinners are to be persecuted.
20. Gays, for example, are persecuted because of their alleged sins. In some cases, leaders of the Religious Right have encouraged acts of physical violence against gays.
21. While the Religious Right has been eager to persecute others for their alleged sins, they have been blind to their own.
22. While the Bible counsels that a rich man can no more enter the of Heaven than a camel can pass through the eye of a needle, many in the Religious Right have celebrated the acquisition of wealth.
23. While the Bible enjoins us against pride, the Religious Right appears to be flush with pride in it's holier than thou stance.
24. While the Bible asks that we be slow to anger, the Religious Right is quick to anger -- indeed it appears to revel in anger and in fanning the flames of anger in others.
25. While the Bible counsels that we are not to be "revilers," key members of the religious right have consistently and aggressively reviled their political enemies as well as those who are perceived to be sinners.
26. It seems then, that the Religious Right picks its sins selectively, ignoring the clear Biblical message against avarice, pride, and anger, and emphasizing selected “sins” that have little to no Biblical basis.
...
31. Item: Religious Right has failed to see that God's call to help our neighbors also extends to our international neighbors.
32. International aggression is not a Christian doctrine.
33. Where the Bible calls us to be peacemakers, the Religious Right claims that we have no business trying to bring peace to troubled areas but rather counsels that we should use military might to secure our business interests.
34. Where the Bible, through the story of the good Samaritan, instructs that we are to help our international neighbors -- indeed, even our enemies -- the Religious Right counsels "America First".
35. But "America First" cannot be a true Christian Doctrine.
36. The Bible gives no special status to political entities like the United States of America, and any suggestion to the contrary is to simply lie about the content of the Bible.
37. God does not bless nation states, and if He did, He surely would not bless them for practicing international internal intolerance, and propping up corrupt kingdoms and military juntas that traffic in institutionalized poverty and violence.
...
65. Item: The Religious Right has paid lipservice to the moral development of children, yet their doctrines are antithetical to the interests of children.
66. They appear to believe that moral development can be accomplished solely through discipline and censorship -- censorship of thought-provoking materials and censorship of the findings of science.
67. Yet, as a group, the members of the Religious Right have failed miserably as parents.
68. Jesus said, "suffer the children come unto me," yet members of the Religious Right have physically and psychologically abused their children.
69. They have advocated corporeal punishment, and have carried out acts of indoctrination on their children which, truth be known, are as severe as those of any fringe religious cult.
70. They have made children to be ashamed of and hate their bodies, when they should be proud that those bodies are the temples of God.
71. They have lied to children about the nature of God's creation, teaching them to ignore the great beauty God has revealed through the biological sciences.
72. In place of that beauty, they have taught their children a theory in which God's revelation through nature is ignored, and an ugly doctrine of fiat creation is espoused.
73. They have taught their children to be intolerant of others, to be hateful of gays and persons of color.
74. They have failed to instruct their children in God's message of love and redemption and have substituted for it a message of exclusion, suspicion, and contempt.
75. They have failed to raise their children according to the teachings of the Bible.
76. They have utterly failed as parents, yet they presume to dictate how we should raise our own children.
...
83. Item: the Religious Right pays lip service to the authority of the Word of God, yet that Word plays little role in the treating of the Religious Right.
84. In place of the message of God's Grace and our redemption, they have substituted a purely political doctrine with no grounding in the Scriptures.
85. Rare are the references to passages of the Bible in the sermons of the Religious Right.
86. Those references that survive, are taken out of context and are merely used to justify preestablished political doctrines.
87. For example, there is no Biblical support for their views on abortion.
88. There is no Biblical support for their right wing economic theories.
89. There is no Biblical support for their campaign of abuse against their own children.
90. There is no Biblical support for their "America First" doctrines.
91. There is no Biblical support for their treatment of persons of color.
92. There is no Biblical support for their treatment of homosexuals.
93. In conclusion: the Religious Right has desecrated the house of God, taking a place of worship and treating it as a soap box in the service or the Right Wing of the Republican Party.
94. The Religious Right has likewise desecrated the Word of God, attributing to the Bible doctrines that are hateful, cruel, and entirely antithetical to the actual contents of the Bible.
95. Christians are to be exhorted to speak out against the Religious Right, as it is a vile heretical movement, wholly outside the teachings of the Word of God.
Interesting stuff. Practicing Christians, and all those interested in the relationship between theology and politics, ought to read all 95.
Godwin on Grokster
Mike Godwin has a wonderful, must-read analysis of MGM v. Grokster over at the Reason site:
But the new decision blurs the bright line of Sony. By opening up the question of whether the designer or manufacturer or distributor of a new technology had the "intent" to "induce" infringement—terms that are not yet fully defined in this context—the Court made sure that company e-mails, advertising, and any other evidence may now be discovered in a trial proceeding, even if the technology itself has the potential substantial lawful use.
June 27, 2005
Startling coincidences
Because of abysmal ratings, ABC has got to be glad that Monday nights aren't for football at the time being, instead freeing up time for Monday night movies, like tonight's broadcast of Air Force One. I don't know if ABC had made a decision to provide some crucial support to President Bush before tomorrow night's Presidential address, but as NBC was probably showing some Queer Eye special and CBS was almost certainly doing some seditious CSI: Gitmo episode, I'm still glad there's one network still willing to call itself the American Broadcast Company.
Anyway, what's interesting now about the movie are the startling similarities between its plot and President Bush's War on Terror. Leaving aside minor details, like the fact that Harrison Ford's President Marshall actually attacks the right guys, it's actually kind of remarkable how similar the characters are.
1) Like President Bush, the fictional President Marshall was a highly decorated Vietnam-era pilot who won the Medal of Honor, though to be honest I can't remember if President Bush was actually in Vietnam or not. And I think that he didn't win the Medal of Honor, but in a highly creative use of the "equal protection" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court decided to give it to him anyway.
2) Like President Mitchell, President Bush speaks a foreign language, though President Mitchell spoke Russian fluently in the film, and President Bush's Spanish is so proficient that when he speaks in English, it actually sounds like he thought of it first in Spanish and than had to translate it on the fly.
3) Like President Mitchell, President Bush does an outstanding cha-cha, though I think that at this point in the film, a combination of summer heat/humidity and single-malt had made me fall asleep, so I woke up in the middle of a commercial for Dancing with the Stars. To be honest, although I have dreamt often and longingly of it, I have never actually seen President Bush dance. And it wouldn't make sense for President Mitchell to dance in the movie. I mean, there were Russian terrorists on the plane!
This was a clever if ultimately unsuccessful way for ABC to protect its operating license from the FCC. Tomorrow night, just after President Bush addresses the nation, ABC will begin its summer miniseries Empire, which has "Homeland Security," "interrupted broadcast," and "summary executions of cast and crew" written all over it. Remind me to take it easy on the single malt tomorrow night. I don't want to miss any of the carnage!
Late update: Oops! The President's name in the movie is Marshall, not Mitchell. My apologies to the screenwriters and to whichever historical figures they based the guy on.
My Grokster Article in Salon.com
You can find it here.
Overall, Monday's Grokster ruling is a middle-ground decision about a territory that has no middle ground. Souter and the court have issued a Solomon-like decision that will do no good for the plaintiffs, do no harm to infringers -- and could have profoundly negative effects on future innovators of technology.
Justice Scalia thinks I'm a second-class citizen ...
... and that the First Amendment applies to me less than it applies to him.
Why? Not because I am a liberal. Not this time, anyway.
It's because he does not think that millions of American Hindus (or Buddhists, Jains, Unitarians, or atheists) have standing under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
Scalia writes in his dissent in McCreary County v. ACLU:
With respect to public acknowledgment of religious belief, it is entirely clear from our Nation's historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists... [T]here is a distance between the acknowledgment of a single Creator and the establishment of a religion. The former is, as Marsh v. Chambers put it, "a tolerable acknowledgement of beliefs widely held among the people of this country." The three most popular religions in the United States, Christianity, Judaism and Islam-- which combined account for 97.7% of all believers -- are monotheistic. All of them, moreover (Islam included), believe that the Ten Commandments were given by God to Moses, and are divine prescriptions for a virtuous life Publicly honoring the Ten Commandments is thus indistinguishable, insofar as discriminating against other religions is concerned, from publicly honoring God. Both practices are recognized across such a broad and diverse range of the population-- from Christians to Muslims-- that they cannot reasonably be understood as a government endorsement of a religious viewpoint
Yes. He said "Deists." Not kidding. Apparently he thinks his beloved Founding Fathers are second-class citizens as well! I don't feel so bad now: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and I will have a rockin' party in Hell! That Benjamin Rush guy is not invited, though. He is such a dweeb.
As Yale Law professor Jack Balkin explains:
And there you have it. If you aren't a monotheist who believes in a personal God, the government may disregard you. You don't count. We won't persecute you, of course, that would violate the Free Exercise of Religion. But we can disregard you. You are insignificant. You are not us, or perhaps more correctly, we count you as part of us when government acknowledges God, and disregard your protestations to the contrary that you have been left out.
Scalia does not deny he makes this distinction. And Balkin is not the only one who is alarmed by this bigotry. In fact, Justice Stevens sees it, too. Here is Scalia responding:
I must respond to JUSTICE STEVENS' assertion that I would "marginaliz[e]" the belief systems of more than 7 million Americans" who adhere to religions that are not monotheistic. Surely that is a gross exaggeration. The beliefs of those citizens are entirely protected by the Free Exercise Clause, and by those aspects of the Establishment Clause that do not relate to government acknowledgment of the Creator.
Balkin summarizes his issue with Scalia:
Once again, I must insist, as I have before in other posts, that although Justice Scalia repeatedly claims that his theory of adherence to text, original understanding and tradition is superior because it constrains judges from imposing their personal views into the Constitution, it does nothing of the sort. This case is a perfect example. Justice Scalia has particular views about religion and about what sorts of government invocations of religion should or should not be regarded as offensive or as marginalizing people with different religious beliefs than his own. These political beliefs produce the outcome he takes in this case
I urge you to read his entire analysis. Jack has to be polite and judicious. That's his job and his temperment. I don't. Here is my problem with Scalia:
Not only does he not understand the diverse forms of the monotheistic religions he champions, Scalia is a hypocrite as well as an ignorant bigot. He claims to be for something called "originalism" and against something called "activism," yet he has no problem being all "activist" if it supports his bigotry or helps his son get a job in the Justice Department.
God(s) -- or no God, whatever -- help us if this guy gets to be Chief Justice.
How Bush's Address Might Succeed
Washington is abuzz about President Bush's prime-time address tomorrow evening. With even Rumsfeld agreeing that the Iraq War is basically a disaster, the debt problem a looming catastrophe that the Bush administration has made far worse, and Bush's approval ratings roughly tied with public support for more Porky's sequels, the President has apparently determined that a few well-turned phrases may turn things around.
To get people's mind off the war and our looming fiscal apocalypse, might I recommend that Bush propose a bold new education plan? Borrowing a page from China, he could unveil the "One Child Left Behind Policy." Every year, an especially stupid American child will be left behind in Fallujah, to serve as a lesson to his/her peers. Enough coddling, I say. It's time to make sure our students are the best educated in the world, except for that science stuff.
Most important, I think President Bush might want to stay mum on the whole negotiating with the terrorists thing.
I'm reading/writing about MGM v. Grokster
Consider this ad from Sony for the Betamax VCR. Would this induce copyright infringement? 
Thanks to Rebecca Tushnet for hipping me to this!
June 26, 2005
On "Street Diva"
Also in the latest New York Review of Books, Arthur Kempton reviews Julia Blackburn's With Billie. The book builds from interviews and "documentary scraps" made by Linda Kuehl, a Billie Holiday fan who committed suicide in 1979. The book sounds great, and Kempton's description of Holiday's life, especially her long friendship with the similarly doomed saxophonist Lester Young, is heartbreaking.
Some Weekend Reading
In today's New York Times Magazine, Michael Ignatieff makes a case for American intervention to promote democracy, just as Tony Judt, writing in the New York Review of Books, asks how critics of the Iraq War can square their support for humanitarian intervention with their opposition to the Bush administration.
Ignatieff heaps scorn on the Democrats for their rejection of Bush's efforts, but both he and Judt argue that Bush's vision of democracy is at odds with those of other democratic nations, and both question the depth of American commitments to democratic development. In a sense, both echo John Ikenberry's concern that the Bush administration's view of America's role in democratization is "distorted and incomplete."
Some quotes in the extended entry...
Both authors come to a somewhat similar conclusion, though with differing levels of anger. Here's Ignatieff:
For a complex set of reasons, American democracy has ceased to be the inspiration it was. This is partly because of the religious turn in American conservatism, which awakens incomprehension in the largely secular politics of America's democratic allies. It is partly because of the chaos of the contested presidential election in 2000, which left the impression, worldwide, that closure had been achieved at the expense of justice. And partly because of the phenomenal influence of money on American elections.
But the differences between America and its democratic allies run deeper than that. When American policy makers occasionally muse out loud about creating a ''community of democracies'' to become a kind of alternative to the United Nations, they forget that America and its democratic friends continue to disagree about what fundamental rights a democracy should protect and the limits to power government should observe. As Europeans and Canadians head leftward on issues like gay marriage, capital punishment and abortion, and as American politics head rightward, the possibility of America leading in the promotion of a common core of beliefs recedes ever further. Hence the paradox of Jefferson's dream: American liberty as a moral universal seems less and less recognizable to the very democracies once inspired by that dream. In the cold war, America was accepted as the leader of ''the free world.'' The free world -- the West -- has fractured, leaving a fierce and growing argument about democracy in its place.
And here's Judt:
...when foreigners look across the oceans at the US today, what they see is far from reassuring.
For there is a precedent in modern Western history for a country whose leader exploits national humiliation and fear to restrict public freedoms; for a government that makes permanent war as a tool of state policy and arranges for the torture of its political enemies; for a ruling class that pursues divisive social goals under the guise of national "values"; for a culture that asserts its unique destiny and superiority and that worships military prowess; for a political system in which the dominant party manipulates procedural rules and threatens to change the law in order to get its own way; where journalists are intimidated into confessing their errors and made to do public penance. Europeans in particular have experienced such a regime in the recent past and they have a word for it. That word is not "democracy."
I'm not entirely persuaded by either account. Judt's slipping the F-word (Fascism) in without using it strikes me as a bit troubling (we're a long, long way from Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy), though I share virtually each of the concerns he raises and am also aware of how dimly even some Japanese conservatives view America's weird psycho-religious trajectory. And Ignatieff, I think, slips when he writes:
It would be a noble thing if one day 26 million Iraqis could live their lives without fear in a country of their own. But it would also have been a noble dream if the South Vietnamese had been able to resist the armored divisions of North Vietnam and to maintain such freedom as they had. Lyndon Johnson said the reason Americans were there was the ''principle for which our ancestors fought in the valleys of Pennsylvania,'' the right of people to choose their own path to change. Noble dream or not, the price turned out to be just too high.
I think he had better in 2003, when he wrote:
Just because Wilson and Roosevelt sent Americans to fight and die for freedom in Europe and Asia doesn't mean their successors are committed to this duty everywhere and forever. The war in Vietnam was sold to a skeptical American public as another battle for freedom, and it led the republic into defeat and disgrace.
Full disclosure: I have no problem in principle with the use of the American military to promote humanitarian outcomes, including democracy, and I certainly do not side with the view that "democracy can't be imposed at gunpoint." I have a lot of faith in guns. If the University of Wisconsin would let me, I would pack a 9 to class in order to ensure the students were actually doing the required reading. But for a ton of reasons -- including the country's ethnic/religious cleavages as well as its dependence on oil, which, as Michael Ross persuasively argues (note: in pdf format) has not historically been particularly helpful for democratization -- I felt Iraq was a poor choice for America to experiment. I also never bought the claims that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda had any meaningful, operational connection.
Anyway, both articles -- by creative minds wrestling with an important question -- are well worth reading. They're certainly provocative for those of us who, having opposed the war to begin with, very much hope that it will somehow create a democratic, peaceful, and prosperous Iraq.
June 25, 2005
The future for Democrats: "market making" vs. "market taking"
a couple of weeks ago I recommended Rick Perlstein's great little book, The Stock Ticker and the SuperJumbo. This is a very important essay that follows on all Rick learned while writing his great book on Goldwater.
Now Henry Brighouse of Crooked Timber offers his analysis of the true value of Rick's argument. It's well worth reading. The comments trail is especially good. Rick is among the responders.
Here is Matt Yglesias' response to Henry's essay. It's also pretty damn brilliant.
Epiphenomena and externalities
The Bush administration has informally asked the Japanese government to extend the Ground Self-Defense Force's mission in Iraq.
When we debate the Iraq war, we tend to make claims about obvious potential outcomes: more/less terrorism, more/less support for democracy in the Middle East, more/less proliferation of WMDs.
But -- and this is what I'll continue in the extended post -- a lot of the important research in the next few years will have to be about the wider implications of the war, largely through the opportunities and constraints it has presented to other global actors. Incidentally, although I thought (and still think) that the war was a bad idea, this post isn't primarily a critique of it.
Let's take Japan as a case, in part because I'm less likely to sound idiotic describing the Japanese political context than I am with other nations. Prime Minister Koizumi came into office in 2001 with extraordinary approval ratings, a committed pro-reform platform, and sky-high expectations regarding his ability to push the reforms past the foot-draggers in his own Liberal Democratic Party.
Within months of Koizumi's taking office, the 9/11 attacks radically changed the context, and probably at an opportune moment for Koizumi; he was already beginning to run up against resistance to his reform plans. I wrote shortly after the attacks about Japan's cooperation with the United States, as did the great historian Gavan McCormack, though his piece was much more critical than mine. Paul Midford's piece in Asian Survey (note: subscription required to download full article) is a very good scholarly treatment in the regional politics involved.
The decision to send Japan's Maritime Self-Defense Forces to Afghanistan had a few consquences. First, it demonstrated support for the Bush administration's strategy at a time that Japanese strategists argue they need American resolve against Japan's security concerns (i.e., China and North Korea) in the Pacific. Second, it provided an opportunity for the Japanese military to expand its political/military role in a region that would be less controversial than deployments in the Pacific, where Japan still faces criticism for its wartime activity and the revisionist efforts to deny atrocities. Third, it may have provided Koizumi with a badly needed opportunity to demonstrate resolve and leadership at a time that his domestic plans were beginning to founder.
With Iraq, of course, Koizumi went much further, committing Ground Self-Defense Forces to the relatively peaceful region of Samawah as part of the US-led coalition. Two of the best political scientists working on Japan, MIT's Richard Samuels (writing here with Llewelyn Hughes, an MIT graduate student; note the file is in pdf format) and the University of Tokyo's Fujiwara Kiichi (note: article in pdf format) advance the somewhat radical though persuasive notion that the Iraq war played into long-term factional disputes in the Liberal Democratic Party. Traditionally, many political scientists treated LDP factions primarily as non-ideological personnel organizations, but new evidence suggests that the Tanaka faction's upper hand on economic issues may be shifting in favor of the Koizumi faction's long-term interest (dating back to the cabinet of Prime Minister Kishi) in security affairs. Incidentally, Samuels's book Machiavelli's Children is terrific for many reasons, though my vote would be for his indispensable research on Kishi Nobusuke, arguably the most important post-war Japanese politician.
Why does this matter? Japan isn't "remilitarizing" in any straightforward way. By some measures, defense spending is dropping even as the government pursues some new plans, like reducing Diet control over the use of the nation's planned missile-defense system. This is important. Even if Japan's military isn't growing right now, the constraints on its actions are loosening dramatically. The Holy Grail, the mother lode, of course is constitutional revision, primarily of Article IX, the remarkably elastic clause that renounces war and prohibits Japan from maintaining armed forces. The right-leaning Yomiuri Shimbun has been pushing for years on this, and the collapse of the traditional left has opened more space for Koizumi to do what would once have been considered unthinkable. His party has begun to draft a new constitution clearly designed to prepare Japan for the possibility of armed conflict.
The implications? From the perspective of US officials, a lot of this is pretty welcome news. Since the Korean War, American foreign policy and military officials have urged Japan to play a more active role in defending itself and the region. It certainly is rattling China's cage, which might be good if you buy the conservative argument that it needs to be restrained, or might be bad if buy the liberal argument that China needs to be drawn into regional security institutions.
My point is that it's at least arguable that a great deal of this is taking place fairly specifically because the War on Terror and then the Iraq War fell into Koizumi's lap, presenting a remarkable opportunity to test the waters of an expanded military mission. So far, so good; no Japanese miltary deaths, and, just as important, no deaths by Iraqis at the hands of Japanese troops. Extending the mission -- which may be unavoidable if Koizumi wants to stay in Bush's good graces -- is a risky venture, and the Defense Agency and Koizumi both know it. The Koizumi faction's interest in a more assertive military stance is a long-term one, and the decline of the Socialists in the Diet would have opened up space no matter what. But a successful Iraq mission provides an extraordinary chance for the Koizumi cabinet to suggest that Japan needs to become more "normal": to have a "normal" military, one that can engage in "normal" security activities.
During the Cold War, international relations scholars had a ready-made template, one based on bilateralism, for understanding regional conflict: communist vs. democratic/capitalist, Soviet vs. American. The template obscured as much as it clarified (e.g., American misunderstanding of USSR-PRC tensions), but it at least simplified the world in ways that allowed scholars to develop theoretical insights that, properly qualified, still serve us fairly well.
My sense is that some very smart scholars (rest assured, I'm not talking about myself; this isn't the kind of work I do) will likely develop tools for thinking about the Iraq war in a quasi-unipolar world. I don't know what patterns will turn out to be useful: American allies that consider themselves potential alternatives to American hegemony in global politics (e.g., France and Germany) vs. those requiring American commitments to maintain their global credibility (e.g., Japan); support from nations concerned primarily about domestic threats (e.g., Uzbekistan, Pakistan) balanced against criticism from those worried about the legitimation of the hegemon's military action (most obviously, North Korea and Iran, though presumably a lot of others too); etc.
The crucial thing is that when we view global politics even ten years from now, I think we'll be looking at a world largely transformed by the Iraq War. That's not a critique of the war per se, because the world might be a much better place and America might be much safer (as Bush's supporters claim, though I'm very, very skeptical). But I suspect that as we discuss regional security concerns, including in the Asia-Pacific, Europe, Central Asia, and the like, we won't be able to do so without discussing the effects of the Iraq War, just as we couldn't do them in the 1970s without considering the Cold War. There are a lot of dissertations waiting to be written about the consequences of the Iraq war, and I hope they'll go beyond the obvious issues of terrorism, WMDs, and regional democratization and will instead consider it a possibly transformative event: the United States (currently the 800-pound gorilla of international politics) shifting the global political context, with far-reaching consequences that we'll grasp only over the long term and with a great deal of hard work.
Another Conservative Propaganda Book; Another Pack of Lies
I could not help myself. This is too delicious.
I guess conservatives are learning from the masters Rove and Bush: Make stuff up and you can get away with anything!
This time they can't get away with it. Al Franken makes sure of that.
June 24, 2005
Et tu, Italia?
It's getting harder and harder to find good allies. Despite having a right-wing leader with close ties to President Bush, Italy has issued arrest warrants for a number of CIA agents involved in the "extraordinary rendition" of Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr, who was allegedly taken by the CIA to Egypt where he reportedly was tortured.
Spain gets cold feet because of a massive bomb in Madrid, Italy gets all up in our grill because we killed a heroic Italian agent who had rescued a kidnapped journalist, and now they're threatening to arrest our agents just because we kidnapped someone off of their streets to deport him to a country with a history of human rights abuse? Man, where's New Europe when you need it?
No Siva Blogging this weekend
Sorry. I have a talk to give in Chicago. So I can't respond to the dozens of interesting comments posted today. Day job. You understand.
Other Sivacracy members may post over the weekend. I can't wait for Ann to get back! I sure am tired.
On Monday, I will post some of my reaction to MGM v. Grokster and Barack Obama's speech to the American Library Association (that's where I am talking).
Also on Monday I will explain the difference between definitional beliefs and specific statements made by individuals.
I will also attempt to explain "therapy and understanding," and how they differ from efforts to analyze and confront.
Don't worry. It's not rocket science.
Liberals are tired of the Right Lying about us
A Tough Liberal says Flush Karl RoveBy Joe Scordato
On 9/11, I watched from my office window in 30 Rockefeller Plaza as smoke poured from the WTC on floors I had been a few months earlier. I saw the fireball from the second plane come out the side of a building where I used to work and where my wife was a few moments before.
I knew it was war then and now and the world would not be the same. Although I was still pissed about Bush v. Gore and had no use for W, I was one of the 90% of the population who supported Bush in those early days in saying Let's go get OBL and the Taliban protecting him and destroying Afghanistan. My support ended when Bush let Osama get away at Tora Bora because Rumsfeld didn't want to damage his pet theory that you can do the job without a lot of troops.
Then before we finished with Al Queda, Bush went into Iraq. He hasn't finished Afghanistan or gotten OBL, but he has managed to destroy the US aura of strength, create a hollowed out army, dragged the good name of America through the mud of arrogance, torture and lying, and left us even more vulnerable to terrorists, all at a cost of billions.
He's hailed as a bold thinker, except all he's done is repeat the same old conservative clap-trap of the past 75 years. A bold thinker would have said let's not be in thrall to the oil merchants funding our enemies. Let's make our economy strong by manufacturing products invented here that wean us from oil.
Now Karl says liberals are traitors and Democrats aren't tough enough to protect the country. I say we're tough enough to protect the country from scroundrels who as always find their last refuge in religion and politics, as well as from terrorists outside the country. It's time for them to go. Rove is no turd-blossom, he's just a turd. Democrats should say no more co-operation on anything until Karl and the scum like him are flushed away. Let's put our program in front of the US and ask for an up-or-down vote. Then we'll show them who's tough enough. No surrender.
News flash
I love Joe Conason, but did he really need his new column on Salon to have the headline "Karl Rove is a Liar"? I mean, why not "Karl Rove is White" or "Karl Rove's First Language is English"? Those would be equally shocking revelations. I understand we liberals have to fight back against Rove's smears, but I sense something different this time than some of his earlier efforts. The president is sinking -- an unwinnable war, a catastrophic fiscal strategy, a Social Security plan about as lovable as penicillin-resistant gonorrhea -- and Rove's most recent comments simply feel like desperation to me. Conason knows this, of course. But a pissing match with Karl Rove is exactly what the Democrats don't need, in part because nobody -- and I mean, even Afleet Alex after a 12-pack -- pisses like Karl Rove. Which, by the way, would be a great title for the column.
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Maybe Rove Just needs a little Therapy and Understanding
Like me, Glenn Smith has known Karl Rove since he was a sniveling little direct mail hack working to elect corrupt judges who would do whatever the tobacco companies asked of him.
Here Glenn tells us about the Real Karl Rove:
Karl Rove's un-American attacks on those who disagree with him deserve the condemnation they're receiving. I've known him for 20 years, and I'm not surprised he said them. He's a socially inept but patient thug whose willingness to haunt the nation's dark political alleys for years, waiting for the right time and the right victims, is too often taken for unparalleled political intelligence.Being attacked by Rove is a little like being criticized by the Boston Strangler. At least you know you're alive. If we want to understand Rove, maybe we should get an FBI profiler.
Rove's a hack. His strength comes from his immorality. There are no barriers. If power didn't corrupt, Rove would have corrupted it.
I've been on the road in America for much of the last two years. I'm asked all the time about the need for Democrats to find their own Karl Rove. If we ever find such a monster in our midst, we should exile him.
I like the black hat Rove wears, but it troubles me that so many people believe he really is a political genius. He's just pathological.
For years I've suspected that Rove is stuck in an adolescent rage, taking revenge upon the Civil Rights marchers (whose courage he couldn't match), the anti-war organizers (who beat him), and those who believe in and struggle for democracy (who drove off Nixon).
I don't recommend therapy for Bin Laden. But Rove might give Dr. Laura a call.
The comments
In recent weeks our conservative friends have added freshness and wit to the comments on this blog. In general, they have kept us honest, pushed away from lazy thinking, and made their objections to our positions quite clear in blunt but effective language. I am glad they are with us. They make this blog better and more interesting.
On at least two occasions, however, they have dipped into bigotry.
One series of comments impugned gay couples as being on the same level and having the same legal claims as those who would exercise polygamy and incest. This is digusting and hateful.
A second comment, which I hope was a throwaway jab and not indicative of a general hatred of poor and African-American women, is troubling as well.
For all our commenters, left, right, center, libertarian, and silly: Please be polite and respectful. Please refrain from racist or homophobic comments.
Pick on me. Make fun of me. Criticize me.
Go after people because they think like me, vote like me, talk like me, and write like me.
Better yet: criticise my thoughts, ideas, expressions, claims, and opinions. But if you must get personal, make me your target.
But don't go after whole classes of people who have done nothing to disrupt your lives or earn your disdain.
I have only erased one comment in the history of this blog: when someone posted as someone else. I have never banned anyone, despite some pretty nasty things said about me (not by any of our regular commentors but by a passing stranger).
Let's try to use the comments to drive discussions forward and correct errors and overstatements. I will continue to allow free commenting as long as the bigotry stays off this site.
We may have a president who likes to have those who disagree with him excluded and forcefully removed from his "town meetings." But we don't have to be as unAmerican as our president, do we?
Support Our Troops
Write, call, e-mail your congressperson and senators demanding they fix this mess.
Thanks, New York Times!
I sometimes worry that the New York Times pays insufficient attention to the myriad complaints of college students, but I now realize that the concern is unfounded. This morning, the Gray Lady bravely tackles the subject of T.A.s with foreign accents with a front page story. Needless to say, with my nearly flawless English, I come out of this one just fine. But I will be watching carefully to see if the Times starts to run stories that might get a little uncomfortable for me, like on teachers "clearly under the influence in the classroom," or "with questionable personal hygiene," or "claiming repeatedly to dislike children."
In fairness, the article tries to look at different sides of the issue, but it veers dangerously close to vindicating fairly parochial assumptions about foreign graduate students, without whom (and I can't emphasize this too strongly) America's top universities would be in real trouble.
Yes, some TAs struggle with their English, but I've heard complaints about the language skills of a large number who are perfectly comprehensible. It's worth watching this clip, which is closer to reality than many would like to admit.
SPURS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Texas Poised for Another National Championship in Baseball
June 23, 2005
Sappho's Fourth Poem!
For centuries scholars and poetry fans have been wondering about the brilliant Helenic poet Sappho. Only fragments of her work has remained.
This week the Times Literary Supplement published a long-lost fourth complete poem by Sappho. It was assembled and translated by Martin West.
Here it is:
"[You for] the fragrant-blossomed Muses’ lovely gifts [be zealous,] girls, [and the] clear melodious lyre:[but my once tender] body old age now
[has seized;] my hair’s turned [white] instead of dark;my heart’s grown heavy, my knees will not support me,
that once on a time were fleet for the dance as fawns.This state I oft bemoan; but what’s to do?
Not to grow old, being human, there’s no way.Tithonus once, the tale was, rose-armed Dawn,
love-smitten, carried off to the world’s end,handsome and young then, yet in time grey age
o’ertook him, husband of immortal wife."
"Rove's indecency knows no limits..."
Check out Todd Gitlin giving it to Karl Rove:
Rove's indecency knows no limits. He parachuted into Manhattan to declare: "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."They lie and lie. The lies carry them into the disaster that is Iraq. They insult, they sneer, and then they lie again. This isn't an accident--it's an identity.
I think Karl Rove should spend more time in New York. He should talk to my neighbors, check out how these liberals reacted to 3,000 of their friends dying at the hands of Osama Bin Laden.
He should see how New Yorkers still treat fire fighters and police officers with solemn respect unmatched in this city's history. He should listen to the passion New Yorkers muster when they talk about how we might rebuild downtown Manhattan.
If he hung out here a while longer, I would challenge Rove to find one advocate of "therapy and understanding" among my neighbors. I bet he would find a whole lot of families with sons and daughters serving in our military overseas, something that was apparently beneath him and his boss (not to mention his boss's unemployed daughters).
And I would hope Rove would have the courage to stand there as my neighbors take him to task for letting Bin Laden escape unscathed. Rove should have to explain to the families that lost loved ones that the killer gets to go free so we can launch into an illegal folly that had nothing to do with the attack we suffered.
Karl Rove should hang out long enough to ask my neighbors how they reacted to the attacks of 9/11/2001. He would find that our blood flowed red. Our hearts sunk, yet stayed open and loving. Our eyes teared. We pulled together and pulled twisted metal off our neighbors. We prayed and raged and stood strong in our most troubling hour.
All we asked for was our country's support. All we got was a president who lied about everything, including the dangers we all shared from breathing in the charred dust and smoke of the smoldering wreckage of Ground Zero. He promised us justice. Instead we got shame.
New York still stands tall, liberals and conservatives together. We still talk about those days when we weren't sure everyone we loved had lived through it, when we weren't sure if there would be more coming soon. All we could be sure of is that we were going to perservere and triumph, that we would stand united and strong. Today, despite Karl Rove's best efforts, we still stand united and strong.
And we still wonder when we will see justice.
Karl Rove should hang out here long enough to see that.
But, as Rick told Major Strasser in Casablanca, "there are some parts of New York where I wouldn't suggest you go."
Karl Rove: Philosopher
Q Last night Karl Rove, in a speech, accused the Democrats of trying to send the terrorists into therapy and not responding appropriately to 9/11, whereas the Republicans, he felt, responded appropriately. He's been called on to make an apology. Will Karl Rove will apologize, and is this elevating the discourse, the way you said the President will do?
MR. McCLELLAN: Talking about different philosophies and different approaches? That's what Karl Rove was talking about. He was talking about the different philosophies and our different approaches when it comes to winning the war on terrorism. And I don't know who is even making such a suggestion.
Q Harry Reid.
Q Nancy Pelosi.
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I would think that they would want to be able to defend their philosophy and their approach. I mean, I know that the Democratic leadership at this point is offering no ideas and no vision for the American people, but Karl was simply pointing out the different philosophies and different approaches when it comes to winning the war on terrorism.
Q He said the Democrats wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. That's not injecting politics into the tragedy of September 11th?
MR. McCLELLAN: I think it's talking about the different philosophies for winning the war on terrorism. The President recognizes that the way to win the war on terrorism is to take the fight to the enemy, to stay on the offensive, and to work to spread freedom and democracy to defend the ideology of hatred that they espouse, and the ideology of tyranny and oppression.
Q So will the President ask Karl Rove to apologize?
MR. McCLELLAN: Of course not, Jessica. This is simply talking about different philosophies and different approaches. And I think you have to look at it in that context. If people want to try to engage in personal attacks instead of defending their philosophy, that's their business. But it's important to point out the different approaches when it comes to winning the war on terrorism. And that's all he was doing.
Q So you're suggesting that Rove's approach to discussing the philosophy that Democrats -- is to say that they want to prepare indictments and seek counseling. That's their philosophy, is that what you were saying?
MR. McCLELLAN: I think the comments were saying -- the conservative approach and the liberal approach is what he was talking about.
Q He was saying that that's the comparison in their philosophies?
MR. McCLELLAN: He was speaking to a political organization. There are many who have looked at the war on terrorism and said it is a law enforcement matter, that we should prosecute people. The President recognizes that it is a war and that we must stay on the offensive, we must take the fight to the enemy. The best way to defeat the enemy is to fight them abroad and bring them to justice before they can carry out their attacks here at home.
Q And the therapy? What about the therapy?
MR. McCLELLAN: I think that's what he's -- and I think that's what he's talking about.
A Study of Fiction writers' attitudes toward Copyright
Fiction writer David Swartz has written an interesting paper:
Conclusion and Recommendations: Authors appear to have a good basic understanding of how copyright works, but their interpretations and attitudes are interesting and in parts contradictory. While authors value personal gain in connection with their writing, they are more likely to define that good in terms of how widely their works are read than in terms of profit. They are lukewarm on questions of the public good in connection with their work but feel that access to a wide range of works is important, and they view Creative Commons, which encourages the free and wide dissemination of works, positively.Interestingly, while they believe that authors and creators benefit from copyright more than the public, their negative view of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act suggests that they do not count themselves among those benefiting. This suggests that they disagree with the arguments of what Vaidhyanathan refers to as the "copyright cartel," who claim that the strengthening of copyright and the rise of intellectual property benefits creative people. Authors do not appear to be aware of the original thrust of copyright, which was conceived as a public good. They do not question its primary use as a tool for the benefit of authors and creators. This reflects the cultural and legal shift traced by critics of copyright such as Lawrence Lessig and Siva Vaidhyanathan. It also suggests that copyright reform will be difficult to implement unless these attitudes change.
My recommendation to researchers wishing to further pursue this topic would be: 1) to try to cast a wider net in order to get responses from a wider range of authors; 2) to ask further questions in an attempt to parse the definition of a public good, and the relationship of fiction to it; and 3) to explore further authors' feelings of who benefits from current copyright laws and who does not. This is an area with wide implications for copyright issues, and warrants further exploration.
Major Bob Bateman on NPR
We'll be listening...
Eric -- A heads up for you and Altercation fans. Because, in part, of his postings on your site, we've invited Maj. Robert Bateman to be our special guest on this week's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. We'll talk to him about his daily life and service in Iraq, and ask him to answer some silly questions... my guess is, he'll handle those obstacles with aplomb, as well. Extra-special Altercation fan bonus: on our panel this week, the immortal, still scabrous and funny, Charlie Pierce. The show will be broadcast nationwide this weekend. Stations and broadcast time are available at our website, waitwait.npr.org, or via your local public radio station.
Best,
Peter Sagal
Dalton Conley Profile
Nature
has a profile of Siva's colleague at NYU, Dalton Conley, who recently made news by winning the National Science Foundation's A. T. Waterman award for achievement by a young researcher. As a social scientist.
Dalton Conley is an award-winning researcher who works on the politically charged issues of race, gender and class. He tells Tony Reichhardt why he wants to stress the 'science' in the social sciences.
Politics and Science
A blog by Chris C Mooney is one of the best at keeping tabs on the tensions between right-wing politics and science. If you care about climate change, evolution and critical thinking in general, check it out. And Mr. Mooney has a new book coming out that I am looking forward to reading.
The Republican War on Science
From Amazon.com
Book Description
In the tradition of What Liberal Media? and What's the Matter with Kansas?, a stinging indictment of how one party has placed politics over science and embraced politically motivated pseudoscience
Science has never been more crucial to deciding the political issues facing the country. Yet science and scientists have less influence with the federal government than at any time since the Eisenhower administration. In the White House and Congress today, findings are reported in a politicized manner; spun or distorted to fit the speaker's agenda; or, when they're too inconvenient, ignored entirely. On a broad array of issues-stem cell research, climate change, missile defense, abstinence education, product safety, environmental regulation, and many others-the Bush administration's positions fly in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus. Federal science agencies, once fiercely independent under both Republican and Democratic presidents, are increasingly staffed by political appointees and fringe theorists who know industry lobbyists and evangelical activists far better than they know the science.
This is not unique to the Bush administration, but it is largely a Republican phenomenon, born of a conservative dislike of environmental, health, and safety regulation, and at the extremes, of evolution and legalized abortion. In The Republican War on Science, Chris Mooney ties together the disparate strands of the attack on science into a compelling and frightening account of our government's increasing unwillingness to distinguish between legitimate research and ideologically driven pseudoscience.
About the Author
Chris Mooney, formerly an editor at The American Prospect, is a journalist specializing in science and politics. He has written for Mother Jones, Wired, the Boston Globe, Slate, and many other publications. This is his first book. Mooney lives in Washington, D.C.
We've Had It: Republicans Hate the Troops/America
We've had it. We've had it with the attacks on our patriotism and the charge that we don't "support the troops" because we are, as a rule, reluctant about sending them off to be killed and wounded for dubious reasons. We've had it with being called unpatriotic by chickenhawks who would never dream of encouraging their own kids to sign up for the military or signing up themselves, but are all too happy to send other people's kids off to die.We've had it with being told that if you think torture is a betrayal of American values, you don't support the troops. We've had it with being told that unless you think the unadulterated clusterfuck that is Iraq is really just a land of butterflies and puppy dogs, then you don't support the troops who are there fighting and dying every day. We've had it with being told that if you use soldiers as props for your photo-ops when your approval ratings dip then you support the troops, but if you mourn those soldiers' deaths then you don't.
We've had it with being told that if you think America is supposed to stand for something more meaningful than just kicking ass, you don't really love your country. We've had it with having every policy criticism we make responded to with an attack on our motives. We have goddamn had it.
But we've also learned that just protesting these vicious, cowardly attacks doesn't work. So here's what we're going to do.
We are delivering the Grand Old Party and its supporters an ultimatum. Henceforth, when you accuse us of hating the military or hating our troops or hating America, we will not bow down and beg for forgiveness. We will stand up and hit back.
From this point forward, until you cease and desist this kind of attack, Democrats will start acting like Republicans. In every debate about national security, we will accuse Republicans in general and individual Republicans of hating our troops, hating America, and secretly sympathizing with terrorists. We won't imply it, we'll say it.
For instance: to this day, there are still American service members driving around Iraq without sufficient armor on their vehicles. As a result of the negligence of the Bush White House, the Pentagon, and the Republican Congress on this issue, dozens, maybe hundreds of American soldiers have died. So Democrats will now start asking, why do Republicans hate our troops so much that they'll let them die this way? Why can't Republicans support our troops?
Why do Republicans hate America so much they'll let us join the list of countries that torture people under their control? Only someone who hates America could do that.
Why does this administration keep giving Al Qaeda new recruiting tools? Are they pro-terrorist?
Why do this administration's supporters keep advocating policies that make America hated around the world? Do they hate America so much they want everyone else to hate it, too?
Why haven't the administration's supporters been screaming bloody murder about the fact that Porter Goss says he knows where Osama bin Laden is, but he hasn't gone to get him? Why don't they want bin Laden captured? Are they hoping he'll organize another attack on America?
Is W the most dangerous liar in American History?
There have been worse people (slaveowners, racists like Woodrow Wilson, incompetents like Warren G. Harding, etc.) in the White House. But the raw historicism of comparing people of different eras and moral universes is deeply unfair to the Washingtons, Jeffersons, and Madisons. So let's just think about the past 50 years or so.
Has anyone been so arrogant with power, so reckless with the truth, so willing to let poor people die for his mistakes, and so outside the bounds of accountability?
Todd Gitlin has some observations about this question.
Yes, Bush is worse than Nixon.
This is a great town
More from Overheard in New York:
Woman: This block has the best garbage!
--2nd Avenue & 8th Street
Girl on cell: We've already got plans again for this weekend. I'm really excited about this guy; he's great. He's really driven, really ready to succeed. He's a doctor...No, not in real life, on TV.
--57th & Lexington
White guy: That wasn't the best day of my life, though. The best day was the day after my birthday when I recovered my hard drive.
--Astoria party
Man on cell: I like them shoes with the ruffle. The ones you wore to the Olive Garden that one time.
--Broadway & Prince
Girl: In theory...I was going to end that sentence with, "the dolphins will be OK."
--7 train
Lady: Well, he's an ex-junkie, an alcoholic, mean-tempered, a practicing bisexual, and he has hepatitus C. But he's a wonderful man and, as guys like that go, he does have great taste in jewelry.
--Midtown office
You take it on faith; you take it to the heart ...
Many of us have been waiting weeks for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in MGM v. Grokster, which considers whether companies that distribute technologies that encourage copyright infringement (like the computer on which you are reading this and the network that send you the data) shall be be liable for contributory infringement, even if they have "substantial non-infringing uses."
Contrary to popular belief, the case is not really about peer-to-peer file sharing. Peer-to-peer file sharing will continue to grow whether or not the Court rules against one company. Short of shutting down the Internet or outlawing search engines, there is nothing any law or ruling or device or digital rights management scheme can do to stop peer-to-peer file sharing. The truth is that peer-to-peer is the Internet and the Internet is peer-to-peer. If you have a problem with peer-to-peer, you have a problem with the Internet.
The case is really about whether the entertainment companies will be able to dictate terms to technology companies and to individuals like you and me.
In other words, the court is deciding whether its 1984 decision that legalized the VCR (barely, 5-4) should stand as is or should be refined and narrowed. It's a tossup, as far as anyone can guess.
Anyway, the ruling was expected on Monday. Then again today. It looks like it will have to be NEXT Monday instead, the last day of this session.
However, the court found the questions about the VCR so difficult and complicated back in the 1980s that they delayed their ruling and requested more oral arguments before ulitmately ruling in favor of us. The justices had a fascinating back-and-forth debate with drafts and memos. They took seriously the idea that Congress had not explicity allowed private, non-commercial copying, yet had in some cases stopped short of explicitly forbidding it.
The result was never certain, yet its ramifications have been powerful. It granted enough confidence to technology firms that the digital revolution could grow without excessive fears of copyright litigation (although there were some exceptions).
For a great account of how we got here, read this article by Jessica Litman.
When the ruling DOES finally come out, check out this amazing group blog of brilliant law professors who will analyze the issue from all angles and persuasions. These are some of the finest minds in IP scholarship.
Or, if you want a less sophisticated and less intelligent analysis, you can read what I am going to write on Salon.com.
The Race to the Bottom
Who can be the least popular elected official in America? It's a close one between W and Arnold!
We told you so -- but we don't feel good about it
Molly Ivins says it better than I ever could:
We are not sitting here gloating because it is the horrible mess we said it would be. We're in agony. There is nothing pleasurable about being a Cassandra. I have said from the beginning that if this thing worked out the way Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Cheney all said it would, I would be perfectly happy to get down on my knees and kiss George Bush's feet.
Now, how do we get out? Can we even have a conversation or deliberation that might save American lives and dignity if the handful of rich people who call all the shots, have all the power, and live in a fantasy world accuse the 61 percent of the country that opposes this war of hating itself and its own children?
What a mess. The radical right has poisoned our political culture to such a degree that we can't even join up to fix the single biggest catastrophe in 40 years.
When Repubublicans control the money
Watch out! You never know where it's going to go! Well, you can be sure some of it will go to Halliburton, of course.
WASHINGTON — It weighed 28 tons and took up as much room as 74 washing machines. It was $2.4 billion in $100 bills, and Baghdad needed it ASAP.The initial request from U.S. officials in charge of Iraq required the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to decide whether it could open its vault on a Sunday, a day banks aren't usually open.
"Just when you think you've seen it all," read one e-mail from an exasperated Fed official.
"Pocket change," said another e-mail.
Then, when the shipment date changed, officials had to scramble to line up U.S. Air Force C-130 cargo planes to hold the money. They did, and the $2,401,600,000 was delivered to Baghdad on June 22, 2004.
It was the largest one-time cash transfer in the history of the New York Fed.
As the President is fond of saying, "it's YOUR money."
Great new blog
Bill Herman writes about intellectual property and information policy. He is on his way to great things.
One more way to make Americans Vote Republican
The less we know, the more likely we are to vote Republican.
Buffalo Bills fan Paul McLeary explains the politics behind the effort to destroy public broadcasting. As usual, it means right wingers get a lot of money to destroy something wonderful.
How to make America more vulnerable
Impede science. Expand secrecy.
A stupider America is not a safer America.
Writing on the wall
Although I love Doug Jehl's reporting and also respect Carl Levin's foreign policy efforts, the framing of this New York Times story is exactly what I've been worried about since the Iraq war began. Basically, the proposed deadline for withdrawal is contingent on Iraqis' setting up their new constitution by next February: get your act together or else. It's pretty obvious how this will play out. When we're forced to withdraw most of the troops (possibly with a sizable contingent stationed in "strategic" areas, principally defined in relation to oil supplies), and when Iraq's civil war worsens, we'll blame the Iraqis. I mean, we gave them a shot! Who could have predicted they'd screw it up? Who needs accountability -- or a coherent foreign policy -- in Washington when we've got fall guys in Falujah?
Admitting error
This is something I'd wondered about. How would the war's most ardent supporters in the Congress feel about the war once they started to realize what they'd been sold? Here's a nice profile of Walter Jones (R-NC), whose district includes three Marine bases and about 60,000 veterans. Jones appears to be so wracked with guilt that he can barely read about the war without crying. And my guess -- before I hear that this is because the liberal media have poisoned his mind -- is that Jones doesn't get a lot of his information from NPR. When the administration decides to withdraw troops, it's going to be in response to pressure from Republicans in Congress.
June 22, 2005
It's Easy to Expose Smalltime Frauds
But how do we unmask the grand frauders?
That's the conundrum of the modern skeptics movement: Intelligent Design theorists and deniers of global warming may very well be phonies and scoundrels, but no one is going to debunk them in the classic sense. You can't reveal their hidden microphones or mimic their tricks with sleight of hand. Intelligent Design, after all, is an attempt to recast (even to "rebunk") Creationism in scientific terms. The best weapon against it isn't dramatic exposé, but scientific argument. So a change in tactics makes sense for the movement.
Godwin's Law
Dropping a "Hitler" or a "Nazi" ends the conversation, according to Godwin. Mike Godwin gets some righteous props in the Washington Post.
Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid yesterday provided a compilation that included, among other things, a statement from Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) last year in which he said the Kyoto Protocol "would deal a powerful blow on the whole [of] humanity similar to the one humanity experienced when Nazism and Communism flourished." Reid's office also charged that Inhofe and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) had compared the Environmental Protection Agency to the Gestapo, that Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) had "linked stem cell research to Nazism" and that former Republican senator Phil Gramm "compared a Democratic tax plan to Nazi law."All of this is consistent with the escalation of political rhetoric in general, says Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown and an expert on political discourse. She mentions the Senate debate over filibusters, in which the "nuclear option" loomed. And conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh, who rails against "feminazis." "It's all part of the same verbal inflation," Tannen says, adding that feminists generally refrain from torturing people.
There is a dictum in Internet culture called Godwin's Law (after Mike Godwin, a lawyer who coined the maxim), which posits that the longer an online discussion persists, the more likely it is that someone will compare something to the Nazis or Hitler.
I am most disquieted by the comparison because few things approach the level of Naziism. So most comparisons deny respect to those who suffered, died, and survived Nazi terror.
I made the same mistake a few weeks back with "Gulag" comparisons.
There is another danger. It can distract. For instance, Sen. Durbin did his argument no favors by allowing his opponents to shift the focus from torture to diction. We have seen it here on this blog.
Sen. Inhofe probably has some important things to say about the Kyoto Protocols. We will never know. He ruined his case by going Nazi on us. Sessions might have had a complex argument about stem cells. Gramm certainly had a lot to say about taxes.
It's about the action, people. Not the diction.
Copyright vs. Criticism
A couple of years ago we saw the Church of Scientology (Save Katie!) use copyright claims and the "notice and takedown" provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to stifle critics.
Now it seems another religious group is doing the same thing.
The Counterproductivity of Software Patents
Richard Stallman has a great op-ed in the Guardian. He is trying to save Europe from making mistakes Americans already made.
Is the President Stupid or Evil?
Marry in Mass!
Melissa and I got married two summers ago on Cape Anne. That's where she is from and where her family lives. But I feel particularly proud of our choice because Massachusetts is the one state in the United States that believes in equal rights for all its citizens. Check out his important op-ed:
Straight, Not Narrow: How Straight Couples Can Support Gay Marriage-- An Op-Ed by Profs. Ian Ayres and Jennifer BrownA little over one year ago, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial court made history with its 2004 decision in Goodridge, generating a new option for gay couples: marriage. But now that it is possible to marry in a jurisdiction that does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, is it moral for heterosexuals to marry in discriminating states? To understand this dilemma, imagine you were living in Virginia when the state still prohibited interracial marriage. Even if you wanted to marry someone of the same race, wouldn't you consider traveling to a neighboring state that did not discriminate?
From now on, every heterosexual couple that wants to marry must face the same question. Some will protest that planning a wedding is tough enough; requiring long-distance planning is unrealistic. But for many couples, Massachusetts is close by. What if a couple lives down the road from Massachusetts? Ten miles away?
Straight, Not Narrow: How Straight Couples Can Support Gay Marriage--An Op-Ed by Profs. Ian Ayres and Jennifer BrownThis article was originally published in the New Haven Advocate on June 16, 2005.
A little over one year ago, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial court made history with its 2004 decision in Goodridge, generating a new option for gay couples: marriage. But now that it is possible to marry in a jurisdiction that does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, is it moral for heterosexuals to marry in discriminating states? To understand this dilemma, imagine you were living in Virginia when the state still prohibited interracial marriage. Even if you wanted to marry someone of the same race, wouldn't you consider traveling to a neighboring state that did not discriminate?
From now on, every heterosexual couple that wants to marry must face the same question. Some will protest that planning a wedding is tough enough; requiring long-distance planning is unrealistic. But for many couples, Massachusetts is close by. What if a couple lives down the road from Massachusetts? Ten miles away?
Besides, for the last century couples have taken their weddings on the road, marrying in, say, Hawaii for scenery or Las Vegas for kitsch. Now they can travel for a different value: equality. It helps that Cape Cod, the Berkshires, and Boston's historic neighborhoods offer lovely venues for weddings and receptions. Mitt Romney said he did not want Massachusetts to become the Las Vegas of "gay marriages." But legalizing same-sex marriages could also make Massachusetts the Las Vegas of straight ally marriages-as "hetero holdouts" travel there to avoid marrying in a discriminatory jurisdiction.
The choices created by Massachusetts marriage equality do not end with travel plans. Even couples who marry at home in discriminating states have some decisions to make. Consider the wedding invitation itself. Even though most gay/bi/lesbian people would never think of raising the issue with their marrying heterosexual friends, they could quite reasonably harbor feelings of disquiet and pain that they are excluded from the very institution they are asked to celebrate. One might think that marriage rights for same-sex couples in some jurisdictions would reduce such feelings of pain and resentment. But a couple's choice to marry in a discriminatory state, even as non-discriminatory options become more readily available, may exacerbate negative feelings.
Perhaps a personal note could accompany invitations to gay and lesbian friends. A couple could apologize for marrying in a state or church where their friends cannot. An explanation, like concern for a sick parent who cannot travel to Massachusetts, might help.
Couples make all sorts of choices about their ceremony. They could include a public statement of support-a prayer or blessing, for example-specifically acknowledging the love and commitment of gay and lesbian couples who cannot marry.
Heterosexuals who marry might devote some combination of time and money to work for change. As newlyweds, they could spend their honeymoon in Massachusetts and reward the state that has done the most to promote marriage equality. In lieu of gifts, couples might ask wedding guests to contribute to freedomtomarry.org or Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, the organization that won the Massachusetts case (and continues to fight for marriage equality).
Massachusetts' innovation gives all of us some choices. Supporters of gay rights, regardless of sexual orientation, may want to reward the state for its progressive stance. Instead of the negativism of boycotts, a grassroots campaign should declare a marriage "buycott." Summer 2005 looks like a great time to visit Massachusetts.
Ian Ayres and Jennifer Brown are law professors at Yale and Quinnipiac universities and authors of Straightforward: How to Mobilize Heterosexual Support for Gay Rights.
Bush vs. Science: Another Voice
The ACLU has released a report called "Science Under Siege: The Bush Administration's Assault on Academic Freedom and Scientific Inquiry":
The report, "Science Under Siege: The Bush Administration's Assault on Academic Freedom and Scientific Inquiry," says the administration has imposed "excessive, unnecessary, and ineffective" restrictions on scientists and academics in order to control scientific inquiry for political purposes.The report specifically criticizes the administration's restrictions on publishing scientific and academic information, its "ill-conceived" visa policies that prevent many international students and researchers from entering the United States or contributing to research, and its limits on the production and use of biomedical agents and on access to materials and technology.
The Bush administration's policies have delayed crucial research, squelched the free flow of ideas, and resulted in a sharp decline in foreign-student applications to and enrollment in American universities, Mr. Romero said. The policies may also keep American scientists from staying on the cutting edge of science and technology for years to come.
A Championship a little later
Ok. So It will happen on Thursday. I was wrong about six games. But seven is sweeter!
At least I was right about this being an amazing series. Detroit and San Antonio are showing the finest defensive skills since Bill Russell's Celtics roamed the Earth. I continue to be amazed by the collapsing defense Larry Brown devised to stop Ginobili and by Ben Wallace's strength, speed, and skill.
Nonetheless, Tim will step up Thursday and all will be right and good in the world.
June 21, 2005
Imagine that
The Bush Administration broke the law and then lied about it.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The federal agency in charge of aviation security collected extensive personal information about airline passengers even though Congress forbade it and officials said they wouldn't do it, according to documents obtained Monday by The Associated Press.
Why does Bush hate the troops so much?
This is shameful. Our draft-dodging liar of a president has ensured that Marines are going into battle unprepared.
WASHINGTON -- Marine Corps units fighting in some of the most dangerous terrain in Iraq don't have enough weapons, communications gear, or properly outfitted vehicles, according to an investigation by the Marine Corps' inspector general provided to Congress yesterday.
As Sen. Chuck Hagel (a real, brave American veteran) says: "Things aren't getting better; they're getting worse. The White House is completely disconnected from reality," Hagel tells U.S. News. "It's like they're just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we're losing in Iraq."
This is how you lose a war. This is how you lose good, young, brave Americans. How can any patriotic American support these buffoons in the White House?
Finding Cultural Democracy in the Internet Movie Database
From the great blog Outside the Whale:
I would argue that the imdb system represents a vibrant form of cultural democracy (of the direct, participatory and reflexive variety), which has all of the trappings of a functioning legal system for decision-making. In essence, imdb can be likened to a state, but a very unique state whose unique brand of democracy may be a model for future forms of decision-making beyond the realm of film criticism. If the imdb web site is a state, then its two branches of government are essentially the executive (those running the web site) and the legislature/citizenry (all those that are granted "citizenship" status by the executive - i.e. registered members who become members of the decision-making apparatus - in someways akin to a legislature comprising all citizens - thus a radical form of direct democracy). Interestingly, there is no judiciary, the integrity of the executive in its performance of its various functions (e.g. accepting and rejecting new members, making sure that the most "useful" comments receive priority status, "weighing" the votes cast on particular films "in order to eliminate and reduce attempts at 'vote stuffing' by individuals more interested in changing the current rating of a movie than giving their true opinion of it" - these individuals are the subversive "terrorists" that threaten the integrity of the system and must thus be rooted out and banished) is only checked by the constant threat that all the members of the site (i.e. the citizenry) will reject the legitimacy of the process and cease to participate (which would essentially "take down" the government). This powerful check seems to be enough to make the system work quite efficiently.
Tonight, Another Championship
Ladies and Gentlemen, tonight at about 11:45 Eastern Time, the San Antonio Spurs will raise the Larry O'Brien trophy once again. A dynasty emerges. Yes indeed.
Alas, I will miss most of the game. My mother is in town and we are going to the ballet tonight. Yep. I love my mother very, very much.
I can't really pick an MVP this time. Tim Duncan has been dominant, yet inconsistent. Game 5 was not his finest hour. Besides, he has two Finals MVP trophies already. Manu Ginobili has had a great game every time the Spurs won and a horrible time in the two losses (coincidence?). Parker has not been sharp since game two. Then there is Robert Horry, going for his sixth ring and always deadly in the playoffs.
How about Bruce Bowen? He has kept Richard Hamilton in check most of the series and then switched to cover Chauncy Billups at the end of Game 5, messing up the Piston's plays and making Billups struggle and choke. Bowen has also been important from the outside corners.
Any thoughts?
Stay away from Austin!
I heard on Marketplace this morning that the next season of MTV's The Real World will be taped in my old hometown of Austin, Texas. This is a very bad development. Every time some magazine (Money, National Geographic, etc.) or television show profiles the city another thousand boneheads move there, making it more crowded, more expensive, and less lovely. It used be cheap, cool, quiet, and clean. About 10 years ago it started looking and feeling like every other American city. And they keep building highways as if new roads have ever solved traffic problems. Now it actually has a all those chain stores and an alarming number of Republicans!
I don't live there any more but I feel for those who do.
STOP MOVING TO AUSTIN! THERE IS NOTHING THERE FOR YOU!
Bush vs. the truth about Iraq
Digby has done the work of going through Bush's speeches during the 2004 campaign to list the number of times he outright lied about the causes of the Iraq war. At no point did the press call Bush on these lies.
Thanks to Michael Froomkin for keeping me posted on the increasing catalogs of Bush lies.
Bush vs. Science: The Lies Listed
WARNING: THIS POST WILL MAKE YOU VERY ILL
We all know the Republicans love to make stuff up: Weapons in Iraq; diagnoses of brain-dead Floridians; Social Security crises. And we know they like prescribing solutions that would not even solve the imaginary problems, let along real ones.
But here you can read the growing list of scientific lies that the Bush administration is perpetuating. Not to worry. They only concern things that might kill your children slowly and painfully.
"If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law."
I don't usually post stuff from the NYTimes because most readers of Sivacracy have easy access to it. But today's guest column by Anthony Lewis is a must read. It concludes:
The moral cost is not so easily put aside. We Americans have a sense of ourselves as a moral people. We have led the way in the fight for human rights in the world. Mistreating prisoners makes the world see our moral claims as hypocrisy.Beyond morality, there is the essential role of law in a democracy, especially in American democracy. This country has no ancient mythology to hold it together, no kings or queens. We have had the law to revere. No government, we tell ourselves, is above the law.
Over many years the United States has worked to persuade and compel governments around the world to abide by the rules. By spurning our own rules, we put that effort at risk. What Justice Louis Brandeis said about law at home applies internationally as well: "If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law."
You can read the entire thing after the jump.
June 21, 2005 Guantánamo's Long ShadowBy ANTHONY LEWIS
BostonWHEN Vice President Dick Cheney said last week that detainees at the American prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were treated better than they would be "by virtually any other government on the face of the earth," he was carrying on what has become a campaign to whitewash the record of abuses at Guantánamo.
Right-wing commentators have been sounding the theme. Columnist Charles Krauthammer said the treatment of the Guantánamo prisoners had been "remarkably humane and tolerant."
Yes, and there is no elephant in the room.
Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation observed what went on in Guantánamo. One reported on July 29, 2004: "On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more."
Time magazine published an extended article last week on an official log of interrogations of one Guantánamo detainee over 50 days from November 2002 to January 2003. The detainee was Mohamed al-Kahtani, a Saudi who is suspected of being the planned 20th hijacker on Sept. 11, 2001, but who was unable to enter the United States.
Mr. Kahtani was interrogated for as long as 20 hours at a stretch, according to the detailed log. At one point he was put on an intravenous drip and given 3½ bags of fluid. When he asked to urinate, guards told him that he must first answer questions. He answered them. The interrogator, not satisfied with the answers, told him to urinate in his pants, which he did. Thirty minutes later, the log noted, Mr. Kahtani was "beginning to understand the futility of his situation."
F.B.I. agents, reporting earlier on the treatment of Mr. Kahtani, said a dog was used "in an aggressive manner to intimidate" him. At one point, according to the log, Mr. Kahtani's interrogator told him that he needed to learn, like a dog, to show respect: "Began teaching detainee lessons such as stay, come and bark to elevate his social status to that of a dog. Detainee became very agitated."
At a minimum, the treatment of Mr. Kahtani was an exercise in degradation and humiliation. Such treatment is forbidden by three sources of law that the United States respected for decades - until the administration of George W. Bush.
The Geneva Conventions, which protect people captured in conflict, prohibit "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment." The scope of that clause's legal obligation has been debated, but previous American governments abided by it. President Bush decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban members who are detained at Guantánamo.
The United Nations Convention Against Torture, also ratified by the United States, requires signatories to "prevent in any territory under its jurisdiction ... cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." The Bush administration declared that this provision did not apply to the treatment of non-Americans held outside the United States.
Finally, there is the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It makes cruelty, oppression or "maltreatment" of prisoners a crime. Armed services lawyers worried that some methods of interrogation might violate the Uniform Code and federal criminal statutes, exposing interrogators to prosecution. A Pentagon memorandum obtained by ABC News said a meeting of top military lawyers on March 8, 2003, concluded that "we need a presidential letter" approving controversial methods, to give interrogators immunity.
The idea that a president can legalize the unlawful evidently came from a series of memorandums written by Justice Department officials. They argued, among other things, that President Bush's authority as commander in chief to set interrogation methods could trump treaties and federal law.
Although President Bush decided to deny detainees at Guantánamo the protection of the Geneva Conventions, he did order that they must be treated "humanely." The Pentagon, responding to the Time magazine article on the treatment of Mr. Kahtani, said, "The Department of Defense remains committed to the unequivocal standard of humane treatment for all detainees, and Kahtani's interrogation plan was guided by that strict standard."
In the view of the administration, then, it is "humane" to give a detainee 3½ bags of I.V. fluid and then make him urinate on himself, force him to bark like a dog, or chain him to the floor for 18 hours.
No one can seriously doubt now that cruelties and indignities have been inflicted on prisoners at Guantánamo. Nor is there any doubt that worse has happened elsewhere - prisoners beaten to death by American soldiers, untold others held in secret locations by the Central Intelligence Agency, others rendered to be tortured by governments such as Uzbekistan's.
Since the widespread outrage over the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Americans have seemingly ceased to care. It was reported yesterday that Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former American commander in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib scandal, is being considered for promotion. Many people would say the mistreatment of Mohamed al-Kahtani, or of suspects who might well be innocent, is justified in a war with terrorists. Morality is outweighed by necessity.
The moral cost is not so easily put aside. We Americans have a sense of ourselves as a moral people. We have led the way in the fight for human rights in the world. Mistreating prisoners makes the world see our moral claims as hypocrisy.
Beyond morality, there is the essential role of law in a democracy, especially in American democracy. This country has no ancient mythology to hold it together, no kings or queens. We have had the law to revere. No government, we tell ourselves, is above the law.
Over many years the United States has worked to persuade and compel governments around the world to abide by the rules. By spurning our own rules, we put that effort at risk. What Justice Louis Brandeis said about law at home applies internationally as well: "If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law."
Anthony Lewis is a former Times columnist.
June 20, 2005
Moving Letters from Veterans and others
True military honor remains alive in this great nation, despite the corrupting influence of the Coward-in-Chief.
Today on Altercation, Major Bob in Baghdad gives us his latest insight. And readers -- most of them vets -- respond to Justin LeBlanc's letter to Altercation from last week that argued that the WMDs were not important and that criticism of the administration was out of bounds.
As one Air Force office responds to LeBlanc:
Your statement trivializing the comments on Guantanamo Bay simply because "Hussein was the 'Stalin' of our times" shows that you have paid little attention to the training and the core values of the U.S. Army. There is no honor in mistreating prisoners. There is no integrity in breaking the law, simply because you want information or rationalize it as applying the enemies' rules against them. There is no courage or selfless service displayed, no duty or loyalty to anything other than the egos of those doing wrong. Any respect that we might have had in the areas surrounding the prison has been severely, if not irreparably, damaged.
I pasted the entire response after the jump because MSNBC does not believe in archives, history, etc.
Soldiers write home (and we write back) • June 20, 2005 | 11:32 AM ETName: Major Bob Bateman
Dateline: Baghdad, Iraq--June 19, 2005
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WHUMPH!
It is 14:32. Local.
An explosion somewhere nearby, shakes the building, lightly. Listening closely for another few seconds, I turn back to my task at-hand. The new guys are looking around. I am not exactly an old-hand myself, but the fact is that given the rate of rotations here in Iraq, I am now the most experienced guy in the room. My non-reaction is the right one for the moment. Later I explain to them why I did not react beyond a casual tilt of the head.
No immediate second explosion means that it is not mortars. It was something big, or it was something close, (it is often difficult to tell which from inside) but there was only one explosion. That means it was either an IED, a Suicide Bomber, or a VBIED of some sort. Or it could have been a rocket. In any case, all of those things pose no threat after the first blast if you are not in the immediate area. Mortars, on the other hand, sometimes come in strings. So a second explosion sends me shuttling to shelter. But one loud explosion is nothing to get worked up about.
This is sad. It means that you are shutting out your very human awareness that somewhere quite nearby, people have just died. It is also necessary. It is part of the cost everyone pays. That is a price which I remit for just one year. My heart goes out to those who live here, who must shut this down even more than I. The alternative to closing this aspect of your life down is too much awareness...much too much. More than some can bear.
A minute later I step outside, ostensibly for a cigarette. It is always good to be aware of your surroundings, especially here. Right now I want to know if there is a different kind of threat coupled with the explosion. It was fairly close.
The wail of sirens competes with the bark of AK-47s not too far away. Range is tough to estimate by ear in a city because of all the echoes. In an open field I can tell you, “that is 500 meters away,” or, “that is a klick,” just as a byproduct of my life. But in a city you get all these strange aural bounces. Still, some smoke orients me and the soundwaves have a fairly straight shot. The firing is just outside the Green Zone, maybe four hundred meters away.
I take a seat on a bench and let my ears read the language of this fight for me, since aside from the small plume of smoke dissipating in the breeze, I cannot see a thing. It is somewhere over 100 degrees. You can feel this heat in your mouth when you breath.
Iraqi Police are converging on the site, and not just a few. Sirens come in from what sounds like the northwest as well as the north and the east. The firing lasts for a little while, but from the intermittent nature it seems to me that this is not so much a firefight as a necessary buttress for the morale of the police. The Iraqi Police as a combatant force is something brand new to Iraq, and they are still finding their feet. Firing your weapon, when you are scared, can bring some measure of resolve. Highly disciplined units can avoid that, as it is wasteful. But the majority of the IPS is not there, yet.
I’ve mentioned before that in this country, under Saddam, the police were traditionally fairly low on the social totem pole. They were corrupt, unsophisticated, and in only a few cases actually involved in what we might think of as ‘law enforcement.’ Sort of like the stereo-typical NYC cop of a century ago. Indeed, the modern American phenomenon of “Cop-as-Hero” really only started about thirty years ago…in Hollywood. It took quite a while for us to change not only how we thought of police, but how police thought of themselves. We’re trying to do that on a much faster pace here, and we don’t have sixty years to do it. I am encouraged, however, by one indisputable fact. One fact which might not have been true just a year ago. One fact that certainly wasn’t possible two years ago.
All of these Iraqi cops are driving towards the sound of the guns.
BAGHDAD WITHIN EARSHOT:
Two of my three daughters have Iraqi pen-pals. Morgan and Ryann write to the daughters or nieces of two of our translators. They could do e-mail, but I won’t allow that yet for the security of everyone involved. As a result, the handwritten letters in both directions pass through me, and the mother and uncle I work with here. Soon, I think, I’ll let my daughters interact directly. I’ve explained to them what they cannot reveal, not just for their own safety, but for their pen-pal’s safety as well. But this contact between teenagers which I’ve witnessed has convinced me of one thing: Teenage girls, regardless of nationality or religion, are strange creatures capable primarily of effective communication only with others of their own species (that being other teenage girls, regardless of nationality or religion).
My father’s sailing delivery is here. As much as I kid him, I am just as much in awe.
You can write to Major Bob at Bateman_Maj@hotmail.com.
Name: Mike Wright
Hometown: Nellis AFB, NV
Dr. Alterman,
In response to the e-mail you published from Mr. LeBlanc, I would like to offer the following response: Mr. LeBlanc, you may be a soldier in the U.S. military; I am glad that you are not a disgrace to my own branch of the service. My experiences since I have worn the uniform have led me to believe that we are the best and most professional military force in the world, however your apparent doctrine of the ends justifying the means is doing as much to challenge my beliefs as the idiots at Abu Ghraib. We are supposed to hold ourselves to the highest standards. We receive annual training in military standards, the Law of Armed Conflict amongst others, and at all times are supposed to live up to the core values of our profession. We are not supposed to use the moral character of our opponents as an excuse for behavior that falls outside of those standards. Your statement trivializing the comments on Guantanamo Bay simply because "Hussein was the 'Stalin' of our times" shows that you have paid little attention to the training and the core values of the U.S. Army. There is no honor in mistreating prisoners. There is no integrity in breaking the law, simply because you want information or rationalize it as applying the enemies' rules against them. There is no courage or selfless service displayed, no duty or loyalty to anything other than the egos of those doing wrong. Any respect that we might have had in the areas surrounding the prison has been severely, if not irreparably, damaged. The same flaw runs through the rest of your argument. If you truly believe that the ends justify the means, then you yourself are no better than Stalin or any other despot that figures he can do no wrong. I have served in Iraq. I know the good that we can and have done in the lives of the Iraqi population. I also know that any good that we do is enhanced or ruined by HOW we accomplish that good.Name: Jerry Damon Jasperson
Hometown: Temple, NH
In response to Justin LeBlanc:
Dear Justin,
I am a veteran and I understand your dismay at the criticisms leveled at your Commander In Chief. However, please remember that your oath was not to a man but to an ideal established by our Forefathers and embodied in our Constitution. Lies and manipulation that result in thousands upon thousands of dead Americans and Iraqis is neither in keeping with your oath nor that of the office of the President. Regardless of Saddam's atrocities, he had nothing to do with 9-11, and hence represented no threat. In the time, world political capitol and money that has been spent, we could have truly done something wonderful with the support of the world and laid waste to the causes of terrorism. Please, Justin, my brother-in-arms, utilize your training, your dedication and courage to stay true to your country, not a man that has never had any skin in this game that you so clearly have staked your life. Since you have access to e-mail, I would cherish the opportunity to continue a respectful discussion with you. Stay safe and out of harm's way.
-Jerry Damon JaspersonName: Brian Geving
Hometown: Minneapolis, MN
As a veteran, I understand and respect Justin LeBlanc's point-of-view. However, I find it strange that he can simply ignore the facts when they don't fit his view of how the world should be. Has he actually talked any of the Koreans that welcomed him to their country? If he had, then he would realize the depth of hatred and resentment throughout the world towards the United States. He may disagree with those feelings, and feel that the U.S. is being treated unfairly, but arguing that that resentment and hatred makes the United States safer is a perfect example of being blinded by ideology. Safer for whom? Certainly not for those soldiers like us who have to pay with their lives and limbs for George Bush's blunder. Because of our mistakes in Iraq, we have over 1700 American soldiers dead and many thousands wounded. I'm not mad at Bush for going to war. I'm mad at Bush for going to war based on lies, and for not being prepared for what happens after we captured Iraq. It is because of him that I thank God every day I'm not grist for the mill. Perhaps Justin is correct, and 20 years from now the world will be a safer place, with democracies flourishing in the Middle East. I hope he's right, but my fear is that we will still be fighting the "War On Terrorism" with no end in sight to the bloodshed...all because we chose to go after a man with no links to terrorism instead of focusing on Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan.Name: Mark Yokomizo
Hometown: Westlake Village, CA
Firstly, I thank Justin LeBalnc for bravely serving our country. He is one of the reasons that we all can express our own personal opinions. I also applaud his optimism over the future of Iraq and the Middle East. However, I do not know if he receives the same information in South Korea as we get here in the USA. Iraq is not a real democracy...yet. It is now a breeding ground for terrorists, given the increasing number of terrorist killings recently. How does LeBlanc reconcile the Iraq invasion with the fact most of the 9-11 terrorists came through Iran and were Saudis? Also, will LeBlanc be willing to take the heat if Iraq and the Middle East do not undergo sweeping changes as he envisions, instead, becoming a more volatile place than it is now? I certainly hope LeBlanc is correct in the long run, because if he is wrong, 20 years from now, he (along with all of us) may be fighting the terrorists here on our soil in a worst case scenario. I hope he's correct, but so far, I believe he is backing the wrong guy.Name: Rob M
Hometown: Atlanta, GA
To Mr. LeBlanc,
First, thank you for your service to our country. Secondly, a fundamental problem with the war in Iraq is that it has not made the U.S. any safer (Osama's still at large, the country's nuclear facilities are still unprotected, DPRK, Iran, etc.). It has only drawn troops and resources away from places that actually do have (or will soon have) nuclear weapons and the capability to launch them against us or our allies. Further, it has diminished our moral authority to lead. We say, "X has nuclear weapons...no we mean it this time." They say, "Are you going to fall for *that* one from the Americans again?" We are not in a position to act effectively unilaterally again.Hussein was a bad man and it's good that he cannot continue to harm people. He got what he deserved and I enjoyed seeing him get it. But, that doesn't mean we were right to trump up bogus charges to do it. If we wanted to go to war because he brutally tortured and killed his own citizens, we should have just said so up front. It may not matter to you that we did not find the stockpiles of weapons, but it drastically affects our ability to act in the world: instead of talking about the DPRK and its ability to launch the nuclear warheads it has onto Japan and the west coast, we are arguing about Iraq. Instead of focusing on Pakistan's AQ Khan and his 'helpfulness' or the stability of Pakistan and its nuclear arsenal, the President and company are busy trying to cover their asses and justify their actions.
I could say that one day, you will see, as we have seen in our country's history of foreign interventions, that on the balance we will only reap misery from our actions there (as we got when we helped remove the Shah, then supported Iraq against the regime that replaced the Shah, while Hussein gassed his own people, etc). But I will not, because neither you nor I know the future and cannot foresee its path. There will be wars that must be fought, but this wasn't one of them. I understand that you are afraid, but we cannot allow fear to compromise our sense of Justice. We cannot allow fear to drive us to ineffective and irrational acts because it feels good or makes us feel in control. We cannot rely on our fear of the ends to justify unjust means. ---- I have wondered about alternate options that could have been taken with Iraq. It seemed that even if they were effective, the UN sanctions were increasingly untenable (wrt lack of support in the UN). We now face similar issues with the DPRK, what's the strategy? What are the criteria for war?
Regards,
rmName: Suzanne Stephenson
Hometown: North Stonington, CT
Hi, Just read the letter from Justin LeBlanc, and I have to admit to being baffled. He doesn't care if there were WMDs or not. Well, if there weren't, in what way, exactly, did invading Iraq impact his family's future safety? Iraq was not a threat to the U.S., even our closest allies agree with that. On the other hand, we have assuredly made generational enemies of thousands of Iraqi citizens, and thousands more Muslims around the world, through our extra-legal torture activities in Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. And the families of the tens of thousands of innocent civilian casualties in Iraq will certainly never be our friends, either. And the assertion that we're better than Stalin? Better than Saddam? Is that the best we as a country can aspire to be? Please. I personally feel much, much less safe today than before we invaded Iraq. It has become a training ground for the terrorists of tomorrow. I wish Mr. (he gave no rank) LeBlanc all the best of luck in his upcoming tour in Iraq. He's gonna need it.Name: Jay Stebley
Hometown: Emeryville, CA
Dr. A,
I would like to answer Mr. LeBlanc's passionate letter - re: doing the right thing by Iraq - by asking the gentleman why he is not currently stationed in Daufur, Kyrgystan, or Myanmar? There have been dozens of nations in recent decades whose people have been senselessly slaughtered by their leaders. The question of WMD in Iraq was the essence of the Bush plan for invasion - he told the American people that Hussein was an imminent threat to this country - make no mistake. That threat has been shown to be non-existent - and they knew it at the time. Your next tour of duty in the sandbox is to protect BushCo. interests, not those of the Iraqi people. Instead of worrying about who's worse - Stalin or Saddam (and the answer is obvious) - read Brent Thompson's letter, below, and think about your future and your country's real future, which at this point, threats from small, fanatical religious groups or no, looks to sink into the dumpster. And please do not mistake this for a slam against you and your difficult mission in service. I'd prefer you were home
This is why I think Wes Clark would make a great president
From Salon.com:
"That flag is our flag," Clark said as applause swelled up and eyes grew teary. "We served under that flag. We got up and stood reveille formation, we stood taps, we fought under that flag. We've seen men die for that flag, and we've seen men buried under that flag. No Dick Cheney or John Ashcroft or Tom DeLay is going to take that flag away from us."
Earlier than all the rest, Clark called Bush et al a bunch of liars who had trumped up this illegal invasion of Iraq to distract the country from the real dangers of Islamic fundamentalism. Earlier than the rest, Clark told Democrats they had better have a clear message about defense and security. Earlier than the rest, Clark understood how far draft-dodging cowards on the right will go to discredit a war hero.
Clark is a brilliant and brave patriot. This is what our country needs, more than anything, from either party. The Democrats offered one last time, but he could not stand up the barrage of lies about his record. Clark might have what it takes. But he might not be willing to endure what Kerry did.
What a shame. This country's cowardly press and immoral right wing can't stand the idea of a brave military person standing up for truth and justice. We are driving the best people (of both parties) away from service.
Some day we will learn the hard way that there is a vast difference between saying "I support the troops" and respecting valor, service, duty, truth, and dignity.
Whatcha reading?
It turns out that the government can lie to you!!!!!!!!
Who knew?
Despite so many "trust us, we know what's good for you" statements from the Justice Department, it turns out that federal agents have been scouring our reading habits after all.
This study comes out the week after the House of Representatives nixed one of the stupidest parts of the USA Patriot Act, the section that would let the FBI demand library records for whatever reason and would forbid librarians from complaining about unwarranted searches.
Another Career Plan Squashed
The main reason I had never run for Congress was that it seemed like the sort of career that might at times interfere with my drinking schedule. In Tokyo -- where it's pretty common to see businesspeople utterly mashed on Friday nights near the bars of Kabukicho, Shibuya, or Ikebukuro -- I had always figured I'd actually make a pretty good Diet member. But the debate surrounding last Friday's Lower House session indicates that Japan has become a killjoy. I suspect they've been hanging out with us for too long. The reassuring part is that the LDP -- having been accused by the main opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan, of being drunk -- responds by saying, "No, you're drunk."
A Brilliant Plan!
As (apparently) the only member of the Sivacracy team rooting for the Pistons, I'd like to refer to their remarkable performance in the final ten seconds of tonight's game. The reigning defensive genius of the NBA, Larry Brown, evidently neglected to mention to his players that they might want to guard Robert Horry just in case he did something uncharcteristic, like decide to fire in a game-winning 3-pointer. Note to Pistons: the guy inbounding the ball can then catch a pass from the guy to whom he inbounded in, and may then shoot it. Or maybe you know that now.
June 18, 2005
Who didn't see this coming?
Today's New York Times reports the unsurprising and probably consequence-less news that Uzbekistani government ministries receiving American counterterrorism support are implicated in last month's massacre in Andijon.
The International Crisis Group provides its usual indispensable coverage of the massacre. Check out its full report in pdf or Word format.
The news is unsurprising because even back in the Clinton years, our counterterrorism support for Uzbekistan conflicted with Madeleine Albright's public recognition that the Karimov government was using terrorism as a justification for brutal abuses of political challengers. This is nothing new, and if the Clinton administration did more Hamlet-like hand-wringing than Bush's theocrats about supporting Karimov with security assistance, both sets have had ample evidence of the culpability of the regime in human rights abuses that shade toward the truly ghoulish.
And it won't have many consequences for the obvious reasons.
June 17, 2005
Hey, my brother ...
... can I borrow a copy of your "Hey Soul Classics?"
Thanks for the nice birthday wishes
I am the luckiest man in the world. My family and friends make that so.
My mother will be visiting us for the next five days. So I will be light on the blog posts. I left quite a few today. So go nuts on the comments.
BTW, I heard a rumor that I share a birthday with Tupac. Anyone know if that's true? That would be cool. 'Pac lives.
June 16 is a good day to have a birthday.
Take the Open Access Pledge
I took it. If you are a scholar, you should too. So far the system is only set up for legal scholars. But it will expand to other areas of study soon. I'll see to that.
Open Access Law: Author PledgeWE, THE AUTHORS OF LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP, BELIEVE that this scholarship should be available to the widest possible audience, regardless of wealth.
WE BELIEVE that law journals should subscribe to Open Access principles, as articulated in the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge, and the Budapest Open Access Initiative.
WE BELIEVE that the ethics of a legal scholar include supporting Open Access principles to ensure free and neutral access to legal scholarship.
THEREFORE, WE PLEDGE to encourage the adoption of Open Access principles in law journals. This means that:
When we have editorial control over a law journal we will adopt Open Access principles as part of editorial policy.
When we act as an advisor to a law journal we will encourage the editors to adopt Open Access principles as part of editorial policy.
When we act as authors contributing to a law journal, we contribute only to journals that adhere to Open Access principles, by offering an author at least the freedoms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.
Who's Reading Sivacracy?
Between midnight and 5 p.m. today, we had visitors from:
Rutland Vermont United States
- MICHIGAN - -
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Anarchist in the Library on Sale at Amazon!
Alert the neighbors! Amazon is selling my latest book, The Anarchist in the Library, super cheap! The hardcover is just $8.99 new and the paperback is $10.88 new.
Go Spurs (again)
Jeff from Michigan expressed the noxious notion that the Pistons should and perhaps will win the NBA Championship.
We at Sivacracy pride ourselves on inviting comments from a wide range of thinkers. But this is just crazy talk! Blasphemy!
The Spurs are the Force of All Good in the Universe! Tim Duncan is the best player of our age. And Pop is the greatest active coach.
The Spurs will win the championship in six games.
Please let me know below what you would like me to wager on this prediction. I will choose a reasonable one and make that pledge.
Two Important Copyright Posts
Yesterday I heard a lawyer for the RIAA tell the same old lies for the hundreth time. Sigh.
For real thought and brutal honesty, read Ernie Miller on Record Companies Intend to Make Criminals of us All.
Instead of focusing their efforts on unrestricted public distribution via P2P networks, the record labels are poising themselves for an attack on copying/sharing among family members and friends. This doesn't seem to me a wise way to attempt to set copynorms. I've long supported the idea of "sharing with friends, not strangers" as a way to reinforce reasonable copynorms.
And in response to Ernie, here is Michael Madison on Casual Piracy.
Ernie Miller condemns the RIAA’s newest campaign – to stamp out “casual piracy” as the work of “short-sighted morons.” Ernie is too kind; short-sighted morons don’t understand the implications of what they’re doing. The RIAA certainly knows what it’s doing: It wants to put people in jail. The rhetoric of “casual piracy” is like the rhetoric of “casual sex.” The evocative language can’t be accidental; the former is like the latter. The rhetoric starts with: Don’t have fun without taking appropriate precautions. Pretty quickly, the rhetoric ends with: Sex = death. That conclusion is wrong on its own terms, and if you agree, and if you follow the analogy, then going after “casual piracy” doesn’t make the RIAA “short-sighted.” It makes the RIAA ignorant to the point of venality. It becomes the Copyright Inquisition.Fortunately, few of us are Copyright Catholics, metaphorically speaking. Sure, one way to think through the implications of this news is to conclude that the RIAA’s tactics will be revealed to the masses as illegitimate: We Can’t All Be Criminals. But that hasn’t happened yet, and I don’t know that it will any time soon, if ever. In the info-sphere, most people have info-spiritual choices.
Please read both posts before commenting.
Todd Gitlin on Gitmo, Homicide, and other crimes
The New York Times (and every other major media outlet) has once again dropped the ball and let the Bush Administration wriggle out from any sense of scrutiny or accountability.
As usual, Todd nails it:
The Bush Administration misses no opportunity to smack the mainstream media around for undermining the otherwise stellar reputation of the United States (Newsweek triggered riots in Afghanistan!). But these same media could plausibly be charged--at least some of the time--with burnishing the Administration's facade.Although militant jihadists need no particular pretext to justify their anti-American outbursts, surely no feature of the American occupation of Iraq has angered more friends, ex-friends and half-friends abroad--not to mention at home--than the torture and often arbitrary imprisonment of suspects in the chain of prison camps stretching from Cuba's Guantánamo to Iraq's Abu Ghraib to Afghanistan's Bagram. Yet to an astonishing degree, the major news media have given a pass to one egregious feature of these American camps, arguably more egregious than torture, sexual titillation, the use of dogs or the desecration of the Koran: the number of detainees who have died in US custody.
It was left to an opinion columnist, the New York Times's Thomas Friedman, not a news reporter, to declare on May 27 that "the abuse at Guantánamo and within the whole U.S. military prison system dealing with terrorism is out of control. Tell me, how is it that over 100 detainees have died in U.S. custody so far? Heart attacks?" ...
I used the LexisNexis database to see what major US news organs have reported about deaths of prisoners in US hands since the beginning of 2005. Here are the results. On television: nothing on CBS, one brief mention on NBC, another on ABC. Nothing on CNN, nothing on Fox, nothing on MSNBC. On public television and radio, now under fire from the head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for "liberal bias": After Friedman's column appeared, Jim Lehrer cited 100 deaths, considering twenty to be "homicide," and NPR's Talk of the Nation interviewed Amnesty International's William Schulz, who said, "Twenty-seven of those detained by the United States have been ruled to be the victims of homicide by medical examiners." That's it from the broadcasting subversives. Nothing from Time--or Newsweek.
Among the top newspapers inventoried by LexisNexis (thus excluding the Wall Street Journal), the Times is almost alone in giving any attention to deaths suffered at American hands. A long and powerful front-page article by Tim Golden on May 22 mentioned two deaths under torture in Bagram. Another front-pager by Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt (March 16) was headlined "U.S. Military Says 26 Inmate Deaths May Be Homicide," citing military officials as its sources. On March 10, in the twenty-third paragraph of a story that started on page one, Schmitt reported that Vice Adm. Albert Church, the naval inspector general, found "68 detainees who died while in American custody," but that only six "were related to detainee abuse." Turning to other major papers: An April 28 report in the Boston Globe mentioned "at least 28 deaths." A Washington Post report on Admiral Church's testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee did not mention deaths at all. That's it from America's major newspapers.
After the massacres of September 11, 2001, the Times published "Portraits of Grief," a series that memorialized the more than 2,700 victims. ABC's Nightline went past its normal length to list the names of all US soldiers dead in Iraq. The sheer numbers of the American dead are of course amply reported, though only some of the wounded are included in official figures. The number of Iraqis thought to be dead and wounded is barely noted. It requires no claim of moral equivalence, no imputation that any or all of the prisoners who died were innocent (or guilty), to say that the death of prisoners at US military bases and prisons is a proper subject of journalistic attention. Friedman, the columnist, rightly called these deaths, whatever their exact number, "not just deeply immoral" but "strategically dangerous." Surely they matter.
The news would not be gloating, or dragging the Bush White House into imaginary mud, if it compiled and investigated these numbers. It would be reporting.
Sivacracy and the world
Last night's overnights are in. People in the following countries were reading Sivacracy:
United States
Italy
Australia
Egypt
France
Czech Republic
Turkey
United Kingdom
Yo! India! Where my homies at? Can I get a shout out?
Sorry we were silent on Thursday
Ann's out of the country. Most of the rest of the crew is travelling or writing. Professors write like maniacs in the summer. And most of us are professors.
I was giving a talk to a group of librarians at the University of Maryland yesterday.
And it was my birthday. No one in the audience wanted to sing "Happy Birthday" to me because they feared infringing on Time-Warner's copyright.
Sad.
Google-Watch uncovers U of Michigan-Google contract!
Gotta love it! The Republicans have not yet shut down the Freedom of Information process in this country!
The great site Google-Watch got the University of Michigan to reveal its previously top-secret deal with Google to allow Google to digitize its library.
Here is the what Daniel Brandt of Google-Watch has to say about it:
This agreement raises some issues:
Google gets to do anything it wants with the public domain material it
digitizes, and U of M cannot do anything with this material other than use
it on their own website, assuming that measures are taken to prevent
crawling, scraping, or other types of automatic retrieval. As for
copyrighted material, Google decides what is "fair use" and what isn't,
and U of M is out of the picture.(Well, Google cannot directly charge for access through Internet search,
but they are free to monetize it the way they've moneitzed web searching.
They can sell or license their any or all of the collection to their partners.)The only place where I saw the word "privacy" in the agreement is here:
"4.5.2 Google shall maintain on its website a privacy policy that governs
collection and use of information that Google obtains from a user of the
Google Search Services."That is absolutely worthless. We know this because every privacy policy
Google has published on their website is absolutely worthless. Every single
one is full of loopholes, assuming you can find anything concrete in them
to begin with.This was interesting:
"6.3 Confidentiality (Exceptions) Google understands that U of M, as a
public institution, is subject to the Michigan Freedom of Information Act,
and any disclosure of Confidential Information required by that statute
will not constitute a breach of this agreement."The whole agreement was confidential. The U of M is the only one of the five
libraries that is not private, and subject to government regulation.
Clearly, Google was hoping that no one would notice. They were almost
right -- it was nearly five months before I decided to search for "freedom of
information" and "university of michigan." Shame on me, and even more
shame on everyone else. But the most shame on Google and the U of M,
who should have taken one look at the situation and decided to skip all
the confidentiality language from the start.This is, after all, clearly a public policy issue. Remember, Google is
on a mission from God to organize all the world's information. That's
just about as public as you can get.
June 15, 2005
Harvard could learn something
How come the University of Maryland at Baltimore Country does so well at recruiting, retaining, and promoting women scientists?
This is my new favorite blog
UPDATE: I FORGOT TO INCLUDE THE LINK!!!! I HAVE FIXED IT NOW
Overheard in New York is a collection of, well, exactly that: stuff people overheard other people saying on the streets of New York City.
Some recent examples concerning food:
Girl on cell: OK, well, get me as many cans of tuna as you can possibly carry. --Washington Square & East 4thSenior VP on phone: No, you can't order Chilean sea bass anymore! They're all bred artificially in ponds. The real ones are going extinct out of sheer deliciousness.
--Madison Avenue officeWoman: It's too hot today for Indian food. Well unless, you know, you're Indian.
--17th & Park
There is no left or right in copyright
I have been saying this for years. Republicans are often our allies in the battle against stupid copyright laws and overenforcement -- the kind that limit creativity and free speech.
Just ask Rush Limbaugh.
Is Bush Wearing a Wire Again?
Check out this video of his news conference. Listen for "in a minute."
Perspective on Brutality
Here is that link that Matt offers us that lends perspective to the discussion of brutality. I recommend it as well. I don't agree with its snide tone. But I deliver plenty of snideness right here. So, you know, glass houses.
I can't refuse Matt's call for perspective. He is right that nothing the United States has done comes close to the brutality of the Soviet Union or Saddam's Iraq. Let's just agree on that.
So I will try to revise my tone in the future. I trust Matt and others will call me on it when I get out of line.
Please understand that it's hard to render passionate commitments to justice in sober tones in a medium such as this. I do not write scholarly tomes up here. I rant and rave. You might have to discount my tone in accordance to that fact.
Avoid, erase, or ignore the tone and diction and the facts remain. The facts.
I can't take seriously he protestation of a draft-dodging hypocrite like Donald Rumsfeld. Nor should you. This man was Saddam's best friend when it served his interests. You never heard a peep about genocide and chemical weapons in Iraq back when the US supported such actions and weapons. Now we are being asked to believe Rumsfeld that people are being treated humanely and legally?
Perspective demands we call out hypocrites wherever they are.
This country is great because it has a template for justice. Only rarely has it lived up to its potential to be good and just. But in my lifetime it has come pretty damn close most of the time.
I don't want the country I love so dearly to devolve into just another kleptocratic and autocratic state run by and for the elite. I can't accept excuses and caveats that cynically justify brutality and torture.
I look at history, listen to the present, and I get scared. It's the facts, man.
June 14, 2005
Defining "humanely" down
Over on Balkinization, Marty Lederman offers an important analysis of the ineffective, illegal brutality that our cowardly, draft-dodging "leaders" have authorized in recent years.
UPDATE: More from Lederman:
One of the more interesting, and disheartening, things about the interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani at Guantanamo in 2002-2003 -- the official log of which is examined in detail in this week's Time Magazine -- is that the military appears to have been fully aware that the techniques it was employing were unlawful. The Pentagon's efforts to provide legal justification for its activities are quite revealing.
UPDATE UPDATE: Apparently Gawker thinks that this constitutes torture:
The interrogation sessions lengthen. The quizzing now starts at midnight, and when Detainee 063 dozes off, interrogators rouse him by dripping water on his head or playing Christina Aguilera music.
Now, Melissa disagrees with me, but I think Christina has pipes, man! She is very talented. Sure, it ain't really Taliban-friendly music. But the Taliban hates ALL MUSIC. So it really does not matter who sings it. All music messes with the Taliban!
In fact, I have always been a big fan of using American popular music to mess with bad people. Remember when US soldiers blasted rock at Manuel Noriega's hideout? I used to hope that they had the wit to use Van Halen's "Panama!"
David Pego, 1954-2005
I just learned that I lost a friend from this world.
Dave Pego was my editor when I worked on the city desk of the Austin American-Statesman back in the late 1980s. I was an underachieving journalist but Dave was a great editor. He also pitched and played right field on my softball team, the Monarchs. We were a very bad softball team, but Dave was a great player.
Mostly, he was a warm, funny, charming, hardworking guy. It was impossible not to enjoy time with him.
I had lost touch with him in recent years. I regret that. I hope y'all enjoy learning about him. You can get a glimpse of his warmth and generosity from this obituary.
David Pego, 51, a longtime journalist and writer, died this week at his home in Brookings, S.D. At the time of his death, he was a regular columnist for the Sioux Falls Argus Leader and Dakota Journal and Lakota Journal and a frequent contributor to several other publicationsA member of the Saginaw Chippewa tribe, he was the first Native American journalist to be named a McCormick Tribune Fellow. David was also a delegate to the historic White House Conference on Indian Education and was the 2000 winner of the Innovators In Education Award. He was also founder of Great Promise for Young American Indians, a non-profit organization, dedicated to creating educational and cultural opportunities for American Indian children
Perhaps David’s greatest accomplishment was as a national leader for Newspapers In Education. David had retired from his position as educational services director of the Austin American-Statesman when the 9-11 attack occurred. He came up with Penny Power in response to the attack. For this NIE project kids from around the nation collected over half a million dollars in pennies and bought a fire truck for New York City. The truck was dedicated to the men and women who were injured or died during the attack and aftermath.
David had been a journalist for more than three decades, working for large metro dailies in Dallas, Oklahoma City and Austin, Texas, as well as having spent time as a desk supervisor with The Associated Press. He was also a part-time journalism instructor at the University of Texas at Austin and a visiting professional at the University of Oklahoma. He spent three years as a contributing editor of the Native American Village at IMDiversity.com. In May he had just completed two years as Knight Foundation Visiting Journalist in Residence at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at South Dakota State University.
While at SDSU he was a tireless advocate for Native American student writers. He organized the student chapter of the Native American Journalist Association /Wordcraft. Wordcraft Circle named him 2005 mentor of the year for those efforts. He also served twice as a mentor for young journalists participating in the Native American Newspaper Career Conference held at the Crazy Horse Memorial in the Black Hills.
While the breadth of his writing ranged from political commentary to comedy, he will be best remembered by his friends and colleagues for his generous spirit and his words of wisdom. In one of his recent columns, he wrote:
“Giving back is the way of my people. I'm a full-blood Saginaw Chippewa Indian from Michigan. I was taught to help others by my grandmother, who always had enough soup to feed anyone who was hungry although we seldom had little more to give.
“My grandmother, who was an artist, also told me that as baskets are constructed so should communities be built. The long wooden splints, when lying on the table alone, were strong but could not hold much on their own singly or in an undeveloped group. It was only when they were woven together into an overlapping, interdependent shape that they could carry many times their own weight.”
David, the son of James and Elsie Pego was born in Mount Pleasant, Mich., on Feb. 1, 1954. He was preceded in death by both parents.
David is survived by his daughter Christina Pego Murray and her husband Jason, and their children Jackson, John-Thomas and Alexandra all of Oklahoma City, a son Anthony Pego of San Diego, and his wife, Jennifer Pego of Massachusetts.
His funeral will be held June 20 at Helms Funeral Home in Mount Pleasant, Mich.
The family has requested that memorials be sent to the David Pego Scholarship Fund for Native American Students at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, South Dakota State University, Brookings, SD 57007, or to the Association of American Indian Physicians,, 1225 Soverign Row, Suite 103, Oklahoma City, OK 73108, Attn: Margaret Knight , executive director, and earmarked for diabetes education.
June 13, 2005
Ernest Miller on the Anti-Science fanatics
First they came after biology
and I did not speak out
because I was not a biologistThen they came after geology
and I did not speak out
because I was not a geologistThen they came after astronomy
and I did not speak out
because I was not an astronomerThey they came after my discipline
and there was no one left
to speak out for my discipline.
A Great Day: opendemocracy.net goes creative commons
Today openDemocracy.net began offering most of its content under a creative commons license.
Here is the essay I wrote about this wonderful event:
Creative Commons: Making copyright work for democracySiva Vaidhyanathan
13 - 6 - 2005Since its inception openDemocracy has set the standard for accessible and informed deliberation of globally important issues. Now it is truly both open and democratic. Siva Vaidhyanathan welcomes openDemocracy to the Creative Commons.
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From 13 June 2005 openDemocracy will be publishing the majority of its articles under Creative Commons licences. It's part of our contribution to global democracy. The rest is up to you.
---------------------------------------------------------------------openDemocracy.net has taken a major step toward enriching global democratic discussion by adopting Creative Commons licences for its articles.
Practically, the use of these licences grant participating openDemocracy authors (including myself) more control over how their works will echo through the world of digital text. They will encourage free republication and dissemination of their articles in non-commercial media across the globe.Ideologically, the fact that this respected publication has opted in to the Creative Commons message makes a profound statement about the importance of openness and the dangers of a culture of excessive ownership.
The articles on openDemocracy deserve to be circulated and used in more than one context. They can be rich resources and raw materials for further scholarship, criticism, and journalism. Their authors often inspire new ways of doing politics. By joining openDemocracy in the Creative Commons, they inspire new ways of sharing and developing knowledge too. Democracy, like culture itself, must be a collaborative project.
Sadly, this symbol © and the phrase “all rights reserved” has come to dominate our cultural markets and practices. Culture and information are closed and owned by default, and the reuse of words, sounds, images and ideas always require explicit permission from some owner (even if that owner is impossible to identify).
Not long ago, any suggestion of a “cultural commons” seemed archaic and sadly comic, like romantic poetry or the American labour movement. No more. Now we have principles and tools to profess and deploy, thanks to Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, the chief founder of the Creative Commons project.
Concerned with the proliferation of what he calls “permission culture”, and inspired by the success of “open source” models of communal creativity in the software field, Lessig decided he had to move from being a critic to a creator. He had to build something great.
In a remarkably short time, he has.
“Permission culture” refers to the stifling effect of restrictive copyright on new cultural and intellectual productions. It developed so quickly and silently we hardly noticed it, thanks to blind faith in neo-liberalism and market fundamentalism.
In just 20 years, copyright changed from being a right designed primarily for authors, artists, and creators to being a tool managed and leveraged by copyright owners – usually big media companies run by ‘uncreatives’ – to maintain monopoly control over their back catalogues.
These companies captured and corrupted copyright to serve their narrow, short-term interests. The law lost sight of its public purpose: to encourage creativity for the next generation, not preserve the domination of the previous.
By default, copyright in America and across the world became “all rights reserved”, which means that even in the absence of a clear statement of ownership, people who want to build on or play with a creation have to expect legal blowback. Over time, this has generated a chilling effect among creators, especially musicians and composers.
The growing rebellion against “permission culture” was until recently unsophisticated, immature, inarticulate and largely negative. Those of us who warned of the costs to democratic culture and the culture of democracy were chided for being “against copyright” or worse, “against capitalism”. We needed something to be for. We needed a new set of tools that could both demonstrate how we think culture and democracy must work and make a clear political statement about the absurdity of recent trends toward absolute control.
Fortunately Lessig and others had been struck by the pragmatic value and astounding success of the Free and Open Source Software movements (together known as FOSS). FOSS resists proprietary control over information and thus innovation by using the masters’ tools against him: copyright itself.
Copyright allows holders to license specific uses and elements as the holder sees fit. So one of the terms of a licence could be to demand that all “downstream uses” reflect the terms of the original licence. In other words, the licence could “lock open” the content and all subsequent uses of the content. “Some rights” could be reserved if the author chose to.
This principle, exemplified by Richard Stallman’s brilliant “General Public License (GPL)” is the key to the success of FOSS. It ensures that while many proprietary interests may use and benefit from open source software, none may capture it for themselves. With hundreds of volunteer authors and editors, the FOSS projects tend to be better and cheaper than comparable proprietary software. And as more people and firms recognise the quality inherent in the model and practice, openness spreads.
Lessig figured the same model could work with culture. His team of lawyers devised a series of customisable licence terms that could be understood and adopted by musicians and video artists, documentarians, and bloggers. Within the first year of the launch of the Creative Commons, thousands of tech-savvy and critically minded netizens adopted Creative Commons licences for their Web projects. Soon others began placing the licence terms on printed material, often alarming traditional publishers, but initiating some important conversations.
In perhaps its biggest splash, Wired Magazine offered a free CD of Creative Commons music in its November 2004 issue. The disc contained works from artists such as David Byrne, Gilberto Gil and the Beastie Boys. The next generation of artists is free to sample and play with the sounds that these brilliant and established creators have released under Creative Commons licences.
In early 2005 the world’s second biggest search engine, Yahoo, launched a Creative Commons search engine, which serves up any article, website or image which you are free to recycle. By using this, or the Creative Commons search tool integrated in the popular Firefox browser, artists may discover a wealth of content they can build upon or sample freely to make new, cool stuff.
Beyond Creative Commons itself, we have witnessed the gestation of a global civil society movement that is pushing back against the information and cultural enclosure movement of the past 20 years. Much of the conversation at the last World Social Forum at Porto Allegre, Brazil surrounded ways to liberate the cultural commons and protect local knowledge from corporate exploitation. Brazil’s Minister of Culture, the great singer and musician Gilberto Gil, is one of the champions of Creative Commons and open, creolized practices of creativity.
In addition to this important move by openDemocracy.net, the British Broadcasting Corporation has opted to release elements of its rich archive of materials for open public re-use under terms and conditions that resemble Creative Commons but do not employ the specific licences and are somewhat more restrictive.
With openDemocracy offering the greater portion of its content under CC licences, the Creative Commons has clearly gone global. Since its inception openDemocracy has set the standard for engaged, accessible and informed deliberation of issues of global importance. Now it is truly both open and democratic.
Copyright ©Siva Vaidhyanathan 2005.
June 12, 2005
Go Spurs: 3 is a magic number
I would have given my kidney to Sean Elliott. And, no, it’s not just because he hit the miracle shot to deflate Portland in the 1999 conference finals, or, people forget, the defensive play on Latrell Sprewell to secure the San Antonio Spurs’ first championship that year.
Less nobly, I would have had Stephen Jackson’s back during the brawl at Auburn Hills earlier this season. And, yes, that is just because he was a starting guard and occasionally key contributor to the Spurs’ 2003 title run.
The Spurs, who I would guess are only liked nationwide by Laker-haters (the same way my Central Texas friends and I appreciated the old Pistons for beating the Celtics and Lakers back in the day), inspire mad loyalty in South Texas. It’s a hinterland microcosm of the Raiders and Red Sox Nations. It’s impossible to say if it matches the unconditional love of a Cub or Met fan, because the Spurs have really never been bad.
This may amaze even sports fans outside of San Antonio, but the Spurs have made the playoffs 25 out of 29 times since the NBA-ABA merger. They were a strong contender in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, making the conference finals three times in that period (the first one going to a Game 7 against the eventual champion Bullets—who won the last three games of the series after falling behind 3-1-- and the other two losses to the Showtime Lakers—no disgrace there).
Three of the four playoff absences were in the interim between the great George Gervin, one of the top two or three shooting guards of all time, and David Robinson, one of the top six or seven centers. Robinson could win 50 games with mediocre talent around him; when he had a Terry Cummings or Dennis Rodman at the top of their game, the Spurs would win 55 to 61 games and go deep in the playoffs.
The Spurs are also one of the luckiest franchises in the NBA. Since the start of the lottery, there have been about three or four times when a consensus first pick could turn around a team immediately. The Spurs drafted two of them: Robinson and Tim Duncan. The acquisition of Duncan turned the team from a middle of the pack playoff team to a championship contender. After the first championship, subsequent losses to the Shaq-led Lakers showed the team’s need for speed, since answered by the amazing draft picks of French point guard Tony Parker (last pick in the first round, who became the starter at 19) and Argentine shooting guard Manu Ginobili (drafted in the second round before becoming a star in the European league).
While Duncan, Parker, and Ginobili provide offensive skills, the team is based on defense. The starting small forward, Bruce Bowen, can impact a game without scoring a point, as he did against the Pistons in Game 1. It’s a versatile team: all five starters and most of the key bench players defend well and, as shown against the high-octane Phoenix Suns, can run with the best of them.
I missed the second half of Game 1 because my band was playing, but the national aftermath reminded me of the 2003 championship run. “The Pistons suddenly couldn’t make shots,” in a way that suggested or in some cases outright said that the Spurs’ defense had nothing to do with it. That was the refrain in 2003, when the three-time defending champion Lakers, the prolific Dallas Mavericks, and the Jason Kidd-led New Jersey Nets suffered similar mysterious droughts (while the Spurs’ outside shooters and pressuring guards were lighting it up on the other side). In 2003, the Spurs were an immensely talented yet generally young and thus occasionally erratic team (all of the guards on the team who saw substantial playing time were in their first or second year) that could turn it on at will.
This year, they are much more talented. Duncan is playing injured and not near the dominant force he was in the first two championship runs, but he can make it happen when he needs to. Parker, Bowen, and especially Ginobili have improved mightily in the two years, and Nazr Mohammed is the decent center the Spurs have lacked since the retirement of Robinson.
Even though the Spurs are better than in 2003, that doesn’t mean the championship is a lock. In 1999 and 2003, the finals were an afterthought. The Spurs had already gone through the toughest teams in the league: sweeps of the Lakers and Portland in 1999, and a tougher victory over a more seasoned Lakers team four years later. The Knicks and Nets paled by comparison. This year, however, the Pistons are tougher than the three talented teams the Spurs beat on the way: a loaded Denver team with tons of momentum, an injured Seattle squad that nonetheless matched up well with the Spurs, and the league’s best regular season team, the Phoenix Suns. If the Spurs win this year, there won’t be any asterisk: Detroit is a great team, a defending champion which has proven amazingly resilient in the last two years.
Players on the original Spurs—from stars like Gervin and Larry Kenon to bench contributors like Coby Dietrich-- still can’t go to restaurants and grocery stores in S.A. without being noticed and appreciated. I think the Spurs will win this series. But even if they don’t, they’ll be the toast of San Antonio for the rest of their lives. At least one couple has already named their child Ginobili. I predict it’ll be one of the most popular baby names in South Texas for years to come.
June 10, 2005
Now we are beating Americans, too
From The Guardian:
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."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."
This is believed to be the first time that private military contractors have been detained in Iraq by the US military, and it has reignited debate about their status and accountability.
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.
... Mark Schopper, a lawyer for two of the contractors, told the newspaper that his clients, both former marines, were subjected to "physical and psychological abuse". He said they had told him that marines had "slammed around" several con tractors, stripped them to their underwear and placed a loaded weapon near their heads.
"How does it feel to be a big, rich contractor now?" one of the marines is alleged to have shouted at the men, in an apparent reference to the large sums of money private contractors can make in Iraq. Lieutenant Colonel David Lapan, a Marine Corps spokesman, who did not respond to emails from the Guardian, said in an email to the LA Times: "The Americans were segregated from the rest of the detainee population and, like all security detainees, were treated humanely and respectfully.
According to Peter Singer, a Brookings Institute scholar and author of the book Corporate Warriors, private military contractors in Iraq are operating in a black hole (emphasis added) as they do not fall within the military chain of command. "What appears to have happened here is tension between forces bubbling to the surface," he told the Guardian.
But he said the incident also 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."
Prisoner Deaths at US hands
Matt corrected me. I can find no record of any prisoners killed at Gitmo. AI did not report that there were.
There is nothing outrageous about calling for prosecution for US leaders who violate human rights accords (not to mention US law). What else would one do to world leaders who use torture as a policy? Isn't that what we wish for such leaders?
Here is what we know as of March:
Prisoner Deaths in U.S. Custody - By The Associated Press Wednesday, March 16, 2005(03-16) 11:30 PST , (AP) --
Using information provided by the military and documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, The Associated Press compiled a partial list of people who have died while in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Prisoner deaths investigated as involving criminal homicide or abuse by U.S. personnel:
_Mohammed Sayari, Afghanistan, April 28, 2002. Army Special Forces captain reprimanded.
_Mullah Habibullah, about 28, Bagram, Afghanistan, Dec. 3, 2002. Sgt. James P. Boland, 377th Military Police Company, charged with dereliction of duty; more charges possible against others.
_Dilawar, 22, Bagram, Dec. 10, 2002. Pfc. Willie V. Brand, 377th Military Police Company, charged with involuntary manslaughter, according to documents obtained by Human Rights Watch. Boland charged with dereliction, assault and maltreatment, more charges possible against others.
_Unidentified person, Wazi Village, Afghanistan, January 2003. Under investigation.
_Jamal Naseer, 18, Gardez, Afghanistan, March 2003. Under investigation.
_Unidentified person, Camp Bucca, Iraq, May 12, 2003. Soldier reprimanded for not using warning shots before killing someone trying to enter the camp.
_Abdul Wali, 28, Asadabad, Afghanistan, June 2, 2003. CIA contractor David Passaro charged with assault.
_Dilar Dababa, Baghdad, June 13, 2003. Died of head injury. USA Today reported he died during interrogation.
_Obeed Hethere Radad, Tikrit, Iraq, Sept. 11, 2003. Soldier discharged for voluntary manslaughter for not warning escaping prisoner before shooting him.
_Manadel al-Jamadi, Abu Ghraib, Iraq, Nov. 4, 2003. Died during interrogation. Several Navy SEALs charged; and two CIA personnel under investigation.
_Abdul Wahid, Helmand province, Afghanistan, Nov. 6, 2003. Badly wounded man dies in U.S. custody. No U.S. charges The Denver Post reported he died at interrogation facility while shackled and gagged.
_Muhamad Husain Kadir, Taal Al Jal, Iraq, Feb. 28, 2004. Pfc. Edward Richmond, 25th Infantry Division, received three years in prison for voluntary manslaughter.
_Karim Hassan, 36, Kufa, Iraq, May 21, 2004. Capt. Rogelio Maynulet, 1st Armored Division, facing court-martial over what he described as mercy killing of wounded Iraq militiaman.
_Unidentified person, 16, Sadr City, Iraq, Aug. 18, 2004. Staff Sgt. Johnny M. Horne Jr., Fort Riley, Kan., sentenced to three years in prison in another purported mercy killing. Staff Sgt. Cardenas J. Alban, also from Fort Riley, convicted and sentenced to one year confinement.
_Three unidentified people, Sadr City, August 2004. Sgt. Michael P. Williams and Spc. Brent May, from Fort Riley, facing murder charges.
_At least 6 more investigated by U.S. Army.
Justified homicide or suspected justified homicide
_Hemdan Haby Heshfan Gashame, Nasiriyah, Iraq, March 29, 2003. Shot while attacking Marine.
_Musa Abbas Farhan, Abu Ghraib, April 10, 2003. Shot during riot.
_Khalid Abbas Mahmood, Abu Ghraib, April 10, 2003. Shot during riot.
_Yasiree Ahmes Al-Haddii, Umm Qasr, Iraq, April 18, 2003. Shot during unrest.
_Unidentified person, Camp Cropper, Iraq, June 12, 2003. Shot trying to escape.
_Ala-Jassem Sa'ad, 22, Abu Ghraib, June 13, 2003. Shot during riot.
_Unidentifed person, Camp Bucca, Iraq, Sept. 22, 2003. Shot during riot.
_Jussayn Ali Salman, about 34, Abu Ghraib, Nov. 24, 2003. Shot during riot.
_Raed Shalaan, about 25, Nov. 24, 2003. Shot during riot.
_Madoor Hussein Sayar, about 21, Abu Ghraib, Nov. 24, 2003. Shot during riot.
_Dawood Mazin Thawin, about 25, Abu Ghraib, Nov. 24, 2003. Shot during riot.
_Naif Sliman Amir, Abu Ghraib, March 28, 2004. Shot during riot.
_Fahin Ali Gumaa, 44, April 28, 2004. Shot in fighting before capture, died in custody.
_Sajid Kadhim Bori al-Bawi, May 17, 2004, Baghdad. Shot during a raid.
_Ibrahim Hamadan Sudhail, May 24, 2004, Abu Ghraib. Shot in fighting before capture, died in custody.
_Fras Moazahim Habib, Abu Ghraib, Aug. 18, 2004. Shot during riot.
_Husham Nafit Ghafar, Abu Ghraib, Aug. 18, 2004. Shot during riot.
_Four unidentified, Camp Bucca, Jan. 31, 2005. Killed during riot.
Prisoners killed in insurgent attack on Abu Ghraib, April 6, 2004
_Karim Masnadane
_Hasan Hamad Abu Nasser
_Ahmed Selfeegi Gaer
_Ismael Abduslhussein Shahab
_Khudair Museif Jassem
_Awad Salih Jassim
_Khalaf Najif Jassem
_Andan Abdulhussein Shahab
_Fourteen unidentified.
Natural causes or accident:
_Unidentified male, Kabul, 2002. Justice Department, CIA investigated, but no prosecution.
_Mohammed Hussain Basim, July 12, 2003. Iraq.
_Mohamed Najem Abed, Aug. 6, 2003, Abu Ghraib prison.
_Twfeek Najm Byatay Al-Zubydy Hamza Hassad, Aug. 7, 2003, Diwania.
_Wathik Mihdy, Aug. 11, 2003, Abu Ghraib.
_Dham Spah, Aug. 13, 2003, Abu Ghraib.
_Ehad Kazam Taled, Aug. 20, 2003, Abu Ghraib.
_Tariq Zaid Mohamed, Aug. 22, 2003. Iraq.
_Abureda Lafta Abdul Kareem, 44, Dec. 9, 2003, Mosul, Iraq. Died while bound and blindfolded.
_Nasef J. Ibrahim, 63, Jan. 8, 2004, Abu Ghraib.
_Bakir Yassen Rashed Al Hussen, Jan. 16, 2004. Iraq.
_Hassan Ekab Ahmed, Feb. 8, 2004, Tikrit.
_Saad Mohammed Abdullah, 54, Feb. 19, 2004, Abu Ghraib.
_Mohamed Abul Abbas, 55, March 8, 2004, Camp Cropper.
_Fathel Ibrahim Mahmood, April 19, 2004, Abu Ghraib.
_Abbas Alwad Fadil, April 19, 2004, Abu Ghraib.
_Hussein Abdullah Awad al-Juwadi, 75, May 11, 2004, Abu Ghraib.
_Abduhl Kaddim Altia, May 22, 2004, Abu Ghraib.
_Riadh Mohammed Abd al Razak, June 10, 2004, Abu Ghraib.
_Sher Mohammed Khan, Sept. 25, 2004, Salerno Firebase, Afghanistan.
_Mohammed Nahar, 71, October 2004, Qaim. Investigated by Navy.
_At least 8 more investigated by U.S. Army.
Unknown or still under investigation:
_Hadi Abdul Hussain Hasson al-Zubaidy, about 32, Unknown date in 2003. Camp Bucca.
_Nagem Sadoon Hatab, 52, June 6, 2003, Nasiriyah, Iraq. Marine said to accidentally break his neck. His boss, Marine Maj. Clarke Paulus, convicted of maltreatment and dereliction and dismissed from military. A sergeant received 60 days hard labor in a case related to Hatab investigation. Navy says investigation still open.
_Jassim Mohammed Saleh Hussein al-Obodi, Aug. 3, 2003, Camp Cropper.
_Mohammed Munim al-Izmerly, 65, Jan. 31, 2004, Camp Cropper. Investigation reopened.
_Fashad Mohamed, April 5, 2004, Iraq.
_Fawaz Badaa Najem, June 14, 2004, Abu Ghraib. Died in cell, cause undetermined after autopsy.
_Unidentified person, Fallujah, Nov. 13, 2004. Navy investigating shooting of wounded insurgent in mosque by a Marine.
_At least 3 more investigated by U.S. Navy.
Sources: U.S. Army, Navy, and other U.S. government officials and documents.
June 9, 2005
Nanotechnology and Patents
Here is one of my recent papers, which will appear in a book later this year.
Nanotechnology and the Law of Patents: A Collision Course In Geoffrey Hunt and Michael Mehta, eds., Nanotechnology and Society: A Multidisciplinary Evaluation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming)Abstract:
In the ill-defined world of “nanotechnology,” a simple sphericule or rod of carbon – the “buckyball” or “nanotube” has been patented not once, but more than 250 times in slightly different forms.1 The dream of nanotechnology – engineering substances at the scale of one nanometer -- reveals many of the dangers of an overprotective patent system. Paradoxically, an overprotective patent system threatens the potential benefits of a fully realized nanotechnology industry. The patent system is supposed to generate a limited monopoly for a specific invention so that the patent holder may extract monopoly rents for a limited time. But by its very nature, nanotechnology complicates the assumptions that underlie the principles of patenting inventions. Nanotechnology bridges the conceptual gaps between substance and information, hardware and software, and technology and science.
A Reason to Believe
I wrote this on Altercation today:
I have to confess. I don't care about Deep Throat. When the news broke, I yawned. I got annoyed when the right-wing media brought out a line of criminals to make some sort of case that Nixon was treated unfairly or that those who pushed on Watergate were somehow betraying this country. In all the talk about intrigue and unnamed sources, I never heard anyone talk about the real lesson of Watergate: accountability.
Deep Throat did not bring down a president. The Washington Post did not bring down a president. The Constitution and the core beliefs of this country brought down a corrupt president.
Watergate was about the Constitution working -- about the system working. It was not about one FBI agent sneaking around a parking garage. It was about enough people -- Republicans and Democrats, journalists and lawyers, citizens and statesmen -- choosing the country over the president, the law over the man.
No Democrat benefited more from Nixon's resignation than James Madison himself. His system of checks and balances, of independent judgment and process prevailed against all odds.
Every time I heard a Chuck Colson or a G. Gordon Liddy consulted last week as some sort of expert on political courage or righteousness, I yearned for the strong, resonant, moral voice of Barbara Jordan.
Jordan, who passed away in 1996, was the first black woman elected to the Texas Senate and the first black woman elected as a U.S. Representative from Texas. As a member of the House Judiciary Committee she gave the most memorable and patriotic address the Capitol had heard since Lincoln spoke.
I remember sitting on a couch with my mother as we watched Jordan address the committee. My mother broke into tears during the talk. I was eight years old. I knew Nixon was a bad man and was happy he was leaving. But I had little sense of the larger, historical issues at work. My mother's tears convinced me there was something much deeper at stake.
Here is some of what Barbara Jordan said that day:
Earlier today we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, We, the people. It is a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed, on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that We, the people. I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision I have finally been included in We, the people.Today I am an inquisitor. I believe hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemness that I feel right now. My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.
Who can so properly be the inquisitors for the nation as the representatives of the nation themselves?" (Federalist, no. 65) The subject of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men." That is what we are talking about. In other words, the juresdiction comes from the abuse of violation of some public trust. It is wrong, I suggest, it is a misreading of the Constitution for any member here to assert that for a member to vote for an article of impeachment means that that member must be convinced that the president should be removed from office. The Constitution doesn't say that. The powers relating to impeachment are an essential check in the hands of this body, the legislature, against and upon the encroachment of the executive. In establishing the division between the two branches of the legislature, the House and the Senate, assigning to the one the right to accuse and to the other the right to judge, the framers of this Constitution were very astute. They did not make the accusers and the judges the same person. ...
... If the impeachment provision in the Constitution of the United States will not reach the offenses charged here, then perhaps that eighteenth century Constitution should be abandoned to a twentieth-century paper shredder. Has the president committed offenses and planned and directed and acquiesced in a course of conduct which the Constitution will not tolerate? That is the question. We know that. We know the question. We should now forthwith proceed to answer the question. It is reason, and not passion, which must guide our deliberations, guide our debate, and guide our decision."
In subsequent years I have reflected on why my mother would cry during such an event. I like to think she knew that the moment that Barbara Jordan made the issue clear to Americans, we were saved. We could push on. We could realize our dream of justice under the law. Perhaps she was thinking about all her family gave up for this country. Her father served in the Navy in three wars. Three of her brothers-in-law served in the Vietnam era. She was a Navy brat, raised on bases around the Pacific, subsisting on cans of Spam and tuna casserole. Perhaps she was thinking about all this country gave to her family. She had married an immigrant, a man severed from his own family by half the world. She was raising children who would have to negotiate these stories and lessons, who would grow up in a world defined by the way power worked in Washington, D.C. Perhaps everything that really mattered to her rested on Barbara Jordan's words that day.
The Democratic Party did not win in 1974. The country did.
Republicans concurred back then. They have forgotten since.
Two years after she helped the Constitution bring down a corrupt president, Barbara Jordan made me cry. I cried along side my mother on that same couch as Jordan adressed the Democratic National Convention in New York City. In this speech she answered the questions that so many readers of this site have been trying to answer for many weeks: What do we believe? What are we for? Barbara Jordan, who had lived it, told us:
We believe that the people are the source of all governmental power; that the authority of the people is to be extended, not restricted. This can be accomplished only by providing each citizen with every opportunity to participate in the management of the government. They must have that.We believe that the government which represents the authority of all the people, not just one interest group, but all the people, has an obligation to actively underscore, actively seek to remove those obstacles which would block individual achievement...obstacles emanating from race, sex, economic condition. The government must seek to remove them.
We are a party of innovation. We do not reject our traditions, but we are willing to adapt to changing circumstances, when change we must. We are willing to suffer the discomfort of change in order to achieve a better future.
We have a positive vision of the future founded on the belief that the gap between the promise and reality of America can one day be finally closed. We believe that.
Do we need a clearer set of principles? I don't think so.
A Reason to Cry
I can only remember one other political event bringing tears to my eyes. During the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in June 1989, I cried whenever I saw people my age (I was in my early 20s) raising symbols of liberty and democracy in the face of tyrants. When I saw that young man stand in front of a tank, I broke down. That's courage. That's what it's all about. That's when I became a fully political person.
That's when I realized how complacent and comfortable we Americans had become. Who among us would stand up in front of a tank in a public square? The system had worked so well in my youth that we were now in danger of letting our pettiness and provincialism overrun us. I started to think about all the ways the rest of the world could come at us to shake us out of our complacency. And I started to think how easy it would be to launch an tyrannical movement from within this country, encased in the language of liberty, yet intolerant, belligerent, and Millenarian.
In these days of complacency, who will take a stand? Who will speak for the Constitution? Who will call tyranny tyranny, before it rises again?
Go Spurs!
I wrote this on Altercation today:
The Sports PageWhew! That was heavy. Ok. Now for some joy.
Early this year I wrote on Altercation that this is the NBA's golden age. I think events have proven me right. Ratings are down, but skills are up. This week we will see the two best defensive teams (emphasis on teams) face off in the NBA finals. They are led by two of the best coaches of all time, Greg Popovich and Larry Brown. It's the Rust Belt (Detroit) vs. the Sun Belt (San Antonio). No coasts are involved. No big shoe contracts will dominate the proceedings. Only basketball. And it will be great.
Some day the NBA bigwigs will figure out how to sell quality instead of flash.
I am especially pleased because my team, the San Antonio Spurs, are certain to capture their third championship in six years.
Gulag?
Sal Weir, one of our fine Sivacracy readers, took issue with my use of "Gulag" to describe US torture prisons. Here is his thoughtful response:
I have VERY serious problems accepting that the U.S. runs a gulag. Let's consider the term: Alexander Solzhenitsyn coined the term The Gulag Archipelago, as I recall, to describe the system of prisons that Josef Stalin's empire ran internally. It was a system based on slave labor which ensnared hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Soviet citizens (and in many cases non-Soviets) for imagined crimes, for crimes as innocuous as criticizing the Red Army for being underarmed (which it sure as hell was, for Stalin had liquidated quartermasters galore, suspecting them along with everyone else of being capitalist conspirators, rightist plotters, Trotskyist deviationists, Bukharinists, Zinovievist imperialist sympathizers, and so on). Stalin killed millions of victims, then killed the executioners, so they would have nothing on him. It was a wicked, endless cycle of massive murder on his own people, based on his paranoiac delusions, on his pathological need to justify his usurpation of Lenin's mantle (itself of rather questionable pedigree).As disagreeable and objectionable as Bush's and Cheney's behaviour can be and has been, they are hardly presiding over a system of prisons that ensnare hundreds of thousands of prisoners then forced into slave labour. Four years ago the U.S. was attacked. President Cheney overreacted, sure, but the fact of the attack is undeniable. The U.S. is not occupying Arabia. The U.S. is not bleeding Iraq of its petroleum. The Saudi monarchy is exploiting its population more than is the U.S.
I would rather see a different person in the White House, and will work actively to change this nation's outlook and values, but to charge it with administering a gulag of prisons is inaccurate, disrespectful, and propagandistic, as well as insulting.
Let us be honest in every discussion. I want to defeat President Cheney at every turn, but my weapons of choice are truth, intellectual vigor and an unerring bullshit detector. Right now, the BSD needle is in the red zone.
Sal is basically right. We do risk our credibility when we lurch into overstatement. But I am more worried that our torture policies suffer from understatement. Our crimes are getting lost in the haze of too many lies and outrages. Someone must make some noise about this stuff. Someone must speak the truth. Amnesty International has the credibility and the truth on its side. So a little overstatement may be appropriate here.
Granted, on a matter of scale, the US is not near the Soviet Union.
But we do contract out torture and murder to an archipelago of camps and prisons around the world (most in places like Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, Uzbekistan) in which many thousands of people are held on US orders without charge, due process, or hope of any kind.
We have the same kind of system that many thuggish authoritarian regimes run. We just outsource most of it.
Meanwhile, hundreds of people are held without due process or even public information about their imprisonment in prisons in New Jersey. And many more are mistreated in Gitmo, the capital of our Gulag system.
Anything close to such a system is untenable and indefensible. If these are not Gulags, they sure are Gulagesque. Should we really rest on arguements like "we are not nearly as brutal as Stalin was?" Our standards should be much higher than this, no?
Even though I am doing it, arguing over the use of the term misses the issue entirely: We are not the country we profess to be. We hold people in secret for years without allowing them to defend or explain themselves. We torture people to death. It is our policy.
And it is shameful and criminal.
I don't regret using the term. I don't regret that Amnesty International used it in their press conference about their annual report (which is unassailable in its reporting, as always).
I just wish people would be more outraged about what our government is doing to people than the vocabulary used to describe it.
What was that revolution about anyway?
The Bush Administration has been hacking together a British-like "officials secrets act" to limit the distribution of information that has nothing to do with security or defense.
John Dean has the story. It's from back in 2003, when Ashcroft ran the show. But it's still an important issue, and one that most of us know nothing about.
I wish the Democrats would make this a campaign issue. I believe that most Americans don't trust the government enough to allow this level of secrecy.
Jefferson would freak out about this. So should every good American who believes in freedom and democracy.
The New Republic Remains Clueless
Ted at Crooked Timber wrote this open letter to The New Republic explaining why he would not resubscribe. Instead, he will send what he would have spent on that hypocritical rag to Amnesty International, which believes in telling the truth.
Jack Valenti dishes with JD Lasica
JD Lasica is the finest technology writer working today. The next couple of weeks he is doing a virtual book tour, guesting on a number of sites including this one.
He is pushing his important new book, Darknet: Hollywood's War on the Digital Generation.
This week he is appearing on Copyfight, where he offers this interview with Jack Valenti, former president of the Motion Picture Association of America.
Jack no longer has that job. So he can let loose. It's a fun interview. Check it out.
June 8, 2005
Old Boy
I just returned from a matinee of the Korean winner of the Cannes Grand Prix, Oldboy, at the arty theater in downtown Madison. Yes, I realize that the movie is old news, and I justify my own tardiness in getting to it by pointing out that (a) it takes longer for foreign films to come to the Midwest; and (b) I pretty much suck, and I often blame the Midwest (which, in my experience, is actually pretty efficient) for my own laziness and indolence.
More info and brief, unimportant, but disturbing spoilers in the extended entry.
Oldboy is the sort of movie that a critic might claim to have "the bulldozing nerve and full-blooded passion of a classic" in large part because "Holy fucking shit," the most coherent reaction I could come up with, seems a little trite.
By the time that an impromptu surgeon severed a tongue late in the movie, I had to admit a bit of surprise that there any body parts that hadn't yet been violated. Hands, teeth, feet, not to mention the ubiquitous anti-genital attacks that act as narrative glue for Japanese comic books (one of which was the basis for the film): there's an amputation for nearly every taste.
Of course, the extraordinarily long, single-shot fight scene, during which Choi Min-Sik takes out what appears to be a small army in a hallway, has the bulldozing nerve and full-blooded passion of a classic.
To sum up: Holy fucking shit.
Greetings
Siva and I had planned to have me join the Sivacracy team yesterday, but we were worried that the simultaneous releases of the new Coldplay and White Stripes albums would really suck the oxygen out of any self-introduction. Since most of my published work is targeted at mopey, lovestruck teenagers and vaguely creepy alt-country-punk fans, we thought it might be better to wait a day to hold off.
My work is mostly on Japanese politics and culture, and you can read more about me at my webpage. When I travel to Japan later this summer to begin a year's stay at the University of Tokyo, I'll probably blog a bit more regularly about matters on that side of the Pacific, especially when they intersect with the blog's larger concerns. Or when they can bring greater glory to Sivacracy. For the time being, expect a lot of misdirected anger -- drawn almost entirely from self-loathing and bitterness -- channeled at summer films.
That said, I'm honored to be on the team and I look forward to being part of the discussion.
Bush vs. science: More lies about global warming
Documents reveal that a Bush underling was editing scientific documents about global warming to make it seem less urgent than it really is.
The war on science continues.
UPDATE: Greg Beato at Wonkette nails it:
Who's in charge of the White House Council on Environmental Quality? Philip A. Cooney, a "lawyer with a bachelor's degree in economics" and "no scientific training." But that doesn't mean he has no relevant experience -- he used to be "a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade group representing the interests of the oil industry." In other words, Prince Abdullah was too busy to accept the White House Council on Environmental Quality gig and Jed Clampett's dead. So Bush went with Cooney, who's in the news today for editorially climate-controlling reports by government scientists that were a little too hot to release in their original form. To wit:
A Primer on the Stem-cell debate
Farhad Manjoo does a great job explaining why Bush keeps pounding his head against the wall on this.
The intro:
Everything you always wanted to know about the stem cell debate
George Bush's opposition to stem cell research is intellectually and morally incoherent. Here's why.
Back in the USSR
To many of us, the political state of this country has started resembling the old Soviet Union. Everything is rigged for cronies. Markets are rigged by the big, connected players. The military calls the shots. Party loyalty matters more than the public good.
Putin and Bush are soul brothers, after all.
And, of course, our government now runs gulags.
Now we find (via Boing Boing) that commuter trains running between DC and Baltimore have these Stalin-era designs urging citizens to turn each other in for "thoughtcrimes" and other suspicious actions.
June 7, 2005
Is it warm in here or is it just me?
The Scientific Academies from Britain, France, Russia, Germany, United States, Japan, Italy, Canada, Brazil, China and India warn human contribution to climate change is real and we better start facing up to it today.
But who cares what a bunch of cranks say.
June 6, 2005
Explaining the Anti-Scientists
Alleluia!
I trust Sheldon Silver about as far as I could throw him but....
Lawmaker Vows Veto, Appearing to End Chances for Stadium - New York Times
A Great Flick
One of the benefits of living around the corner from the Angelika Movie Theater is that you can pop over and see a movie you know nothing about and most times it will be great.
That was true for this flim, Saving Face. Check it out when it comes to your neck of the woods.
When America Works: Why I don't care about Deep Throat
Deep Throat did not bring down that criminal, Nixon. Neither did Bob Woodward or the Washington Post.
The U.S. Constitution did.
Need to believe again? Read below.
Opening Statement to the House Judiciary Committee Proceedings on Impeachment of Richard NixonBarbara Jordan
"Mr. Chairman, I join my colleague Mr. Rangel in thanking you for giving the junior members of this committee the glorious opportunity of sharing the pain of this inquiry. Mr. Chairman, you are a strong man, and it has not been easy but we have tried as best we can to give you as much assistance as possible.
"Earlier today we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, We, the people. It is a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed, on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that We, the people. I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision I have finally been included in We, the people.
"Today I am an inquisitor. I believe hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemness that I feel right now. My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.
"Who can so properly be the inquisitors for the nation as the representatives of the nation themselves?" (Federalist, no. 65) The subject of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men." That is what we are talking about. In other words, the juresdiction comes from the abuse of violation of some public trust. It is wrong, I suggest, it is a misreading of the Constitution for any member here to assert that for a member to vote for an article of impeachment means that that member must be convinced that the president should be removed from office. The Constitution doesn't say that. The powers relating to impeachment are an essential check in the hands of this body, the legislature, against and upon the encroachment of the executive. In establishing the division between the two branches of the legislature, the House and the Senate, assigning to the one the right to accuse and to the other the right to judge, the framers of this Constitution were very astute. They did not make the accusers and the judges the same person.
"We know the nature of impeachment. We have been talking about it awhile now. "It is chiefly designed for the president and his high ministers" to somehow be called into account. It is designed to "bridle" the executive if he engages in excesses. "It is designed as a method of national inquest into the public men." (Hamilton, Federalist, no. 65.) The framers confined in the congress the power if needbe, to remove the president in order to strike a delicate balance between a president swollen with power and grown tyrannical, and preservation of the independence of the executive. The nature of impeachment is a narrowly channeled exception to the separation-of-powers maxim; the federal convention of 1787 said that. It limited impeachment to high crimes and misdemeanors and discounted and opposed the term "maladministration." "It is to be used only for great misdemeanors," so it was said in the North Carolina ratification convention. And in the Virginia ratification convention: "We do not trust our liberty to a particular branch. We need one branch to check the others."
The North Carolina ratification convention: "No one need be afraid that officers who commit oppression will pass with immunity."
"Prosecutions of impeachments will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community," said Hamilton in the Federalist Papers, no. 65. "And to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused." I do not mean political parties in that sense.
The drawing of political lines goes to the motivation behind impeachment; but impeachment must proceed within the confines of the constitutional term "high crimes and misdemeanors."
Of the impeachment process, it was Woodrow Wilson who said that "nothing short of the grossest offenses against the plain law of the land will suffice to give them speed and effectiveness. Indignation so great as to overgrow party interest may secure a conviction; but nothing else can."
Common sense would be revolted if we engaged upon this process for insurance, campaign finance reform, housing, environmental protection, energy sufficiency, mass transportation. Pettiness cannot be allowed to stand in the face of such overwhelming problems. So today we are not being petty. We are trying to be big because the task we have before us is a big one.
This morning, in a discussion of the evidence, we were told that the evidence which purports to support the allegations of misuse of the CIA by the president is thin. We are told that that evidence is insufficient. What that recital of the evidence this morning did not include is what the president did know on June 23, 1972. The president did know that it was Republican money, that it was money from the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, which was found in the possession of one of the burglars arrested on June 17.
What the president did know on June 23 was the prior activities of E. Howard Hunt, which included his participation in the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, which included Howard Hunt's participation in the Dita Beard ITT affair, which included Howard Hunt's fabrication of cables designed to discredit the Kennedy administration.
We were further cautioned today that perhaps these proceedings ought to be delayed because certainly there would be new evidence forthcoming from the president. The comittee subpoena is outstanding, and if the president wants to supply that material, the committee sits here.
The fact is that yesterday, the American people waited with great anxiety for eight hours, not knowing whether their president would obey an order of the Supreme Court of the United States.
At this point I would like to juxtapose a few of the impeachment criteria with some of the president's actions.
Impeachment criteria: James Madison, from the Virginia ratification convention. "If the president be connected in any suspicious manner with any person and there be grounds to believe that he will shelter him, he may be impeached."
We have heard time and time again that the evidence reflects payment to the defendants of money. The president had knowledge that these funds were being paid and that these were funds collected for the 1972 presidential campaign.
We know that the president met with Mr. Henry Petersen twenty-seven times to discuss matters related to Watergate and immediately thereafter met with the very persons who were implicated in the information Mr. Petersen was receiving and transmitting to the president. The words are "if the president be connected in any suspicious manner with any person and there be grounds to believe that he will shelter that person, he may be impeached."
Justice Story: "Impeachment is intended for occasional and extraordinary cases where a superior power acting for the whole people is put into operation to protect their rights and rescue their liberties from violations."
We know about the Huston plan. We know about the break-in of the psychiatrist's office. We know that there was absolute complete direction in August 1971 when the president instructed Ehrlichman to "do whatever is necessary." This instruction led to a surreptitious entry into Dr. Fielding's office.
"Protect their rights." "Rescue their liberties from violation."
The South Carolina ratification convention impeachment criteria: those are impeachable "who behave amiss or betray their public trust."
Beginning shortly after the Watergate break-in and continuing to the present time, the president has engaged in a series of public statements and actions designed to thwart the lawful investigation by government prosecutors. Moreover, the president has made public announcements and assertions bearing on the Watergate case which the evidence will show he knew to be false.
These asseritons, false assertions, impeachable, those who misbehave. Those who "behave amiss or betray their public trust."
James Madison again at the Constitutional Convention: "A president is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the Constitution."
The Constitution charges the president wiht the task of taking care that the laws be faithfully executed, and yet the president has counseled his aides to commit perjury, willfully disregarded the secrecy of grand jury proceedings, concealed surreptitious entry, attempted to compromise a federal judge while publicly displaying his cooperation with the processes of criminal justice.
"A president is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the Constitution."
If the impeachment provision in the Constitution of the United States will not reach the offenses charged here, then perhaps that eighteenth century Constitution should be abandoned to a twentieth-century paper shredder. Has the president committed offenses and planned and directed and acquiesced in a course of conduct which the Constitution will not tolerate? That is the question. We know that. We know the question. We should now forthwith proceed to answer the question. It is reason, and not passion, which must guide our deliberations, guide our debate, and guide our decision."
Who Then Will Speak for the Common Good?: Feeling Down about America? Read this
After the link is Barbara Jordan's keynote address to the 1976 Democratic Convention.
We believe that the people are the source of all governmental power; that the authority of the people is to be extended, not restricted. This can be accomplished only by providing each citizen with every opportunity to participate in the management of the government. They must have that.We believe that the government which represents the authority of all the people, not just one interest group, but all the people, has an obligation to actively underscore, actively seek to remove those obstacles which would block individual achievement...obstacles emanating from race, sex, economic condition. The government must seek to remove them.
We are a party of innovation. We do not reject our traditions, but we are willing to adapt to changing circumstances, when change we must. We are willing to suffer the discomfort of change in order to achieve a better future.
We have a positive vision of the future founded on the belief that the gap between the promise and reality of America can one day be finally closed. We believe that.
Barbara Jordan Democratic Convention Keynote AddressWho Then Will Speak for the Common Good?
New York, New York, July 12, 1976
One hundred and fourty-four years ago, members of the Democratic Party first net in convention to select a Presidential candidate. Since that time, Democrats have continued to convene once every four years and draft a party platform and nominate a Presidential candidate. And our meeting this week is a continuation of that tradition.But there is something different about tonight. There is something special about tonight. What is different? What is Special? I, Barbara Jordan, am a keynote speaker.
A lot of years passed since 1832, and during that time it would have been most unusual for any national political party to ask that a Barbara Jordan deliver a keynote address...but tonight here I am. An I feel that notwithstanding the past that my presence here is one additional bit of evidence that the American Dream need not forever be deferred.
Now that I have this grand distinction what in the world am I supposed to say?
I could easily spend this time praising the accomplishments of this party and attacking the Republicans but I don't choose to do that.
I could list the many problems which Americans have. I could list the problems which cause people to feel cynical, angry, frustrated: problems which include lack of integrity in government; the feeling that the individual no longer counts; the reality of material and spiritual poverty; the feeling that the grand American experiment is failing or has failed. I could recite these problems and then I could sit down and offer no solutions. But I don't choose to do that either.
The citizens of America expect more. They deserve and they want more than a recital of problems.
We are a people in a quandary about the present. We are a people in search of our future. We are a people in search of a national community.
We are a people trying not only to solve the problems of the present: unemployment, inflation...but we are attempting on a larger scale to fulfill the promise of America. We are attempting to fulfill our national purpose; to create and sustain a society in which all of us are equal.
Throughout out history, when people have looked for new ways to solve their problems, and to uphold the principles of this nation, many times they have turned to political parties. They have often turned to the Democratic Party.
What is it, what is it about the Democratic Party that makes it the instrument that people use when they search for ways to shape their future? Well I believe the answer to that question lies in our concept of governing. Our concept of governing is derived from our view of people. It is a concept deeply rooted in a set of beliefs firmly etched in the national conscience, of all of us.
Now what are these beliefs?
First, we believe in equality for all and privileges for none. This is a belief that each American regardless of background has equal standing in the public forum, all of us. Because we believe this idea so firmly, we are inclusive rather than an exclusive party. Let everybody come.
I think it no accident that most of those emigrating to America in the 19th century identified with the Democratic Party. We are a heterogeneous party made up of Americans of diverse backgrounds.
We believe that the people are the source of all governmental power; that the authority of the people is to be extended, not restricted. This can be accomplished only by providing each citizen with every opportunity to participate in the management of the government. They must have that.
We believe that the government which represents the authority of all the people, not just one interest group, but all the people, has an obligation to actively underscore, actively seek to remove those obstacles which would block individual achievement...obstacles emanating from race, sex, economic condition. The government must seek to remove them.
We are a party of innovation. We do not reject our traditions, but we are willing to adapt to changing circumstances, when change we must. We are willing to suffer the discomfort of change in order to achieve a better future.
We have a positive vision of the future founded on the belief that the gap between the promise and reality of America can one day be finally closed. We believe that.
This my friends, is the bedrock of our concept of governing. This is a part of the reason why Americans have turned to the Democratic Party. These are the foundations upon which a national community can be built.
Let's all understand that these guiding principles cannot be discarded for short-term political gains. They represent what this country is all about. They are indigenous to the American idea. And these are principles which are not negotiable.
In other times, I could stand here and give this kind of exposition on the beliefs of the Democratic Party and that would be enough. But today that is not enough. People want more. That is not sufficient reason for the majority of the people of this country to vote Democratic. We have made mistakes. In our haste to do all things for all people, we did not foresee the full consequences of our actions. And when the people raised their voices, we didn't hear. But our deafness was only a temporary condition, and not an irreversible condition.
Even as I stand here and admit that we have made mistakes I still believe that as the people of America sit in judgment on each party, they will recognize that our mistakes were mistakes of the heart. They'll recognize that.
And now we must look to the future. Let us heed the voice of the people and recognize their common sense. If we do not, we not only blaspheme our political heritage, we ignore the common ties that bind all Americans.
Many fear the future, Many are distrustful of their leaders, and believe that their voices are never heard. Many seek only to satisfy their private work wants. To satisfy private interests.
But this is the great danger America faces. That we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual. Each seeking to satisfy private wants.
If that happens, who then will speak for America?
Who then will speak for the common good?
This is the question which must be answered in 1976.
Are we to be one people bound together by common spirit sharing in a common endeavor or will we become a divided nation?
For all of its uncertainty, we cannot flee the future. We must not become the new puritans and reject our society. We must address and master the future together. It can be done if we restore the belief that we share a sense of national community, that we share a common national endeavor. It can be done.
There is no executive order; there is no law that can require the American people to form a national community. This we must do as individuals and if we do it as individuals, there is no President of the United States who can veto that decision.
As a first step, We must restore our belief in ourselves. We are a generous people so why can't we be generous with each other? We need to take to heart the words spoken by Thomas Jefferson:
Let us restore to social intercourse the harmony and that affection without which liberty and even life are but dreary things.
A nation is formed by the willingness of each of us to share in the responsibility for upholding the common good.
A government is invigorated when each of us is willing to participate in shaping the future of this nation.In this election year we must define the common good and begin again to shape a common good and begin again to shape a common future. Let each person do his or her part. If one citizen is unwilling t participate, all of us are going to suffer. For the American idea, though it is shared by all of us, is realized in each one of us.
And now, what are those of us who are elected public officials supposed to do? We call ourselves public servants but I'll tell you this: we as public servants must set an example for the rest of the nation. It is hypocritical for the public official to admonish and exhort the people to uphold the common good. More is required of public officials than slogans and handshakes and press releases. More is required. We must hold ourselves strictly accountable. We must provide the people with a vision of the future.
If we promise as public officials, we must deliver. If we as public officials propose, we must produce. If we say to the American people it is time for you to be sacrificial; sacrifice. If the public official says that, we (public officials) must be the first to give. We must be. And again, if we make mistakes, we must be willing to admit them. We have to do that. What we have to do is strike a balance between the idea , the belief, that government ought to do nothing. Strike a balance.
Let there be no illusions about the difficulty of forming this kind of a national community. It's tough, difficult, not easy. But a spirit of harmony will survive in America only if each of us remembers that we share a common destiny.
I have confidence that we can form this kind of national community.
I have confidence that the Democratic Party can lead the way. I have confidence. We cannot improve on the system of government handed down to us by the founders of the Republic, there is no way to improve upon that. But what we can do is to find new ways to implement that system and realize our destiny.
Now, I began this speech by commenting to you on the uniqueness of a Barbara Jordan making the keynote address. Well I am going to close my speech by quoting a Republican President and I ask you that as you listen to these words of Abraham Lincoln, relate them to the concept of national community in which every last one of us participates:
As I would not not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of Democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference is no Democracy.
No IVF!
Slate has an article describing the "pro-life" agenda regarding IVF. I, for one, cannot wait. This is the issue where the radical religous right will come undone.
A persistent vegetative state was nothing compared to the war that will be fought over IVF.
Leave No Embryo Behind - The coming war over in vitro fertilization. By William Saletan
Rick Perlstein on Hope for Democracy and Democrats
Rick Perlstein wrote a brilliant book on Barry Goldwater and how losing in 1964 meant winning in 1984 (and, although he could not have known at the time, 2004).
Now he has published a great essay in a little book by Prickly Paradigm Press.
Here he is with a short version of it as a guest blogger on Kevin Drum's Political Animal:
"The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo," by Rick Perlstein.The Congressional losses of 1994 touched Bill Clinton's deepest anxieties, and made him willing to weaken the institution that made him, for personal survival. Dick Morris did it the way a corporate raider would. By showing indifference to any stakeholder but the swing voter, he gladly risked the loyalty of those who had been willing to stick with the institution through thick and thin. "The fact that it would anger Democrats was not a drawback but a bonus," George Stephanopoulos recalls of Morris's strategy — just as angering long-term stakeholders is a bonus for a corporate manager looking to prove to Wall Street his macho bona fides. It gives the stock a goose. The only risk being, of course, the long-term health of the institution.
Political scientists, having established that party identification is the best predictor of voting behavior, need to study how many party identifiers the Democrats lost specifically as a result of this kind of thinking. They need to measure the opportunity cost of doing what Dick Morris said needed to be done to win the 1996 election and the opportunity cost of the Morris-like habits that currently saturate Bill Clinton's party. Now that Dick Morris has been disgraced, it's easy to laugh at him. But we all know what happens to those who laugh imperiously in parables. He lost the battle. But did his legacy of stock-ticker thinking also lose Democrats the war?
Some of the evidence is close at hand. It's hard to identify with a party when you don't know what it stands for or how it differs from its opponent. According to exit polls taken during the 2002 congressional elections, only 34 percent of voters thought the two parties differed on the one issue the Democratic leaders Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle made the core of the congressional campaigns: providing prescription drugs under Medicare. Meanwhile, on another issue of widespread voter concern — the economy, encompassing both the recent corporate scandals and mounting unemployment — the leadership offered no coherent ideas at all. So it was that voters who rated the economy their most important issue voted Republican in House elections 52 percent to 48 percent at a time when the president presiding over the faltering economy was a Republican.
I have noted that many voters no longer remember the Democratic Party's reputation as the institutional embodiment of the worst excesses of the 1960s. But there's something else they don't remember: that the Democrats were once the clear and obvious institutional embodiment of their own economic interests.
How do we know this? John Judis and Ruy Teixeira make a fascinating observation about the increasing number of voters who refuse to identify with a party: "When the new independent vote is broken down, it reveals a trend towards the Democrats in the 1990s and a clear and substantial Democratic partisan advantage. . . . once these independents are assigned the party they are closer to, Democrats enjoy a 13 percent advantage over Republicans." They add that among the 15 most independent-rich states, ten belong to the Democrats — big ones like Connecticut, Illinois, Michigan, and Virginia. Two of them swing. The other three are tiny.
Here's a riddle: what is a swing voter? More and more, it is an American who thinks like a Democrat but refuses to identify as one.
...If it is true that party identification — which, as Stan Greenberg argues, is a form of social identity that endures over the long term — is the best predictor of voter behavior, isn't getting this selfsame public to identify with the Democratic Party much, much more than half the solution?
So how to do it? Democrats must stop looking leaderless, fumbling, unfocused, disorganized, and confused. They must give voters something to identify with. They must no longer judge themselves sophisticated when they cancel all the old long-term dreams. They need new long-term dreams.
Ronald Reagan used to say that there are no easy answers but there are simple answers. The answer to this problem is simple, and not easy. The Democrats need to make commitments, or a network of commitments, that do not waver from election to election. If you are trying to build an institution that commands respect and power unto generations — that can reproduce itself — wise superjumbo projects have intrinsic value, whatever their precise content, whether they end up failing or succeeding. The investments pay off, not in immediate profit, but in the equity that comes from sweat. Because they require patience, they build fortitude. Because they require their stakeholders to take risks, they inspire an evangelical commitment to redeeming the risk. Even if they don't succeed, they leave something behind: an institutional infrastructure, a rich network of stakeholders at multiple levels of commitment and intensity — an institutional soul.
More on the Google Deal
After the jump I have reposted the excellent comments on Google that Sivacracy readers Jessamyn (major voice in the library community) and Michael Zimmer (super-smart doctoral student in my department) posted. I made their suggested links hot. Please read their posts and links.
And please add your voice and suggestions.
• What are the costs and benefits of the Google-library deal?
• Is this the sort of thing libraries should be doing?
• How would such a system affect your research/book buying/library habits?
• How would the "Google paradigm" (in Zimmer's words) affect our world?
------------------------
The broadest issue is the widespread acceptance of the "Google paradigm" for organizing, distributing and accessing information. Google has become the "center of gravity" for information navigation and knowledge acquisition, a situation that begs for critical examination.
Additionally, privacy advocates fear Google's ability to track user's library usage as they access texts via the Google Print project, compounding the privacy concerns related to personalized search.
Posted by: Michael Zimmer at June 1, 2005 05:39 PM
---------------------------------
A lot of my concerns were summed up in this article by Wade Roush, particularly the ownership of information issue.
While I understand why Google feels entitled to dictate terms of use on content they have "value added" through scanning and digitization to, it's a far cry from making that material flat-out AVAILABLE -- for whatever you want, for whatever you can imagne -- the way the library did, and does.
Google indexes my web site but Google does not own my web site. From the article:
"The Michigan library, says Wilkin, may do whatever it likes with the digital scans of its own holdings—as long as it doesn’t share them with companies that could use them to compete with Google. Such limitations may prove uncomfortable, but most librarians say they can live with them, considering that their holdings wouldn’t be digitized at all without Google’s help."
Brewster Kahle's doors metaphor is worth learning.
It really looks like this will increase access at low cost, but that's different -- especially in other countries -- from no cost. I suppose one could argue that having one copy of a book in one location places prohibitive costs on someone who is not at that location in the current library model, but the larger library network that you can reach via interlibrary loan and co-operative sharing takes care of a lot of that, assuming people know about it.
In short, it's going to happen. Libraries can play more of a leadership role both in preserviing access to these materials and keeping Google in check when they try to use their massive computing systems and storage banks to increase their own market share for their advertising. Putting this sort of knowledge-is-power power in the hands of a publicly held company [even one that does no evil] which has certain shareholder obligations, is concerning to me.
Posted by: jessamyn at June 3, 2005 08:50 AM
Sivacracy International
I just looked up the national origin of visitors to Sivacracy. In just 24 hours on Sunday and Monday morning (New York time), this is who came by to check us out:
United States
Norway
Canada
Switzerland
Denmark
Germany
Netherlands
Korea, Republic Of
Finland
Japan
United Kingdom
Macedonia, The Former Yugoslav Republic Of
Thanks to everyone for reading our stuff here at Sivacracy. This is pretty cool and fun.
Does the Truth Make us Safer?
From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Federal Officials Ask National Academy of Sciences Not to Publish Paper on BioterrorismBy KELLY FIELD
Washington
Citing security concerns, federal officials have asked the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences not to publish a Stanford University researcher's paper on biological terrorism. The journal has pulled the paper from its May 30 online edition and is evaluating whether to revise it before publication.
The paper -- by a business-school professor, Lawrence M. Wein, and a graduate student, Yifan Liu -- details how terrorists might attack the nation's milk supply with botulinum toxin, and offers suggestions for how to thwart such an attack.
Mr. Wein declined on Friday to be interviewed for this article, but in an essay he wrote for the op-ed page of The New York Times last Monday, he called for stricter regulations to ensure that the milk supply "is vigilantly guarded, from cow to consumer." The guidelines in place now are voluntary, he wrote.
Marc W. Wolfson, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said officials there and at the Food and Drug Administration had been alarmed by the level of detail the paper provides. He said it was the first time the agency had asked a journal to remove a paper that had already been accepted for publication.
"It was basically a road map on how you could use botulinum toxin to taint the milk supply in the United States," he said. "We felt that the benefits of printing the article were outweighed by the potential harm it could do."
The federal request was made on May 27, in a letter sent by Stewart Simonson, assistant secretary for public-health emergency preparedness at the Department of Health and Human Services, to Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, which publishes the prestigious journal.
Mr. Alberts declined to comment on the situation, but a spokesman for the journal provided a statement saying that the journal and the academy "have agreed to take another look at the paper in question ... and new release dates will be announced."
Mr. Wolfson said senior officials at the two federal agencies would meet with the journal's editors this week to discuss the paper further.
The National Academy of Sciences is a private organization chartered by Congress to advise policy makers on scientific and technical issues.
June 5, 2005
The Forgotten Hostage
Once again we see that our mainstream media organizations are either too timid or too lazy to follow up on important stories that might demonstrate the incompetence (or worse) of the Bush administration.
From the Rittenhouse Review:
KEEPING ROY HALLUMS IN MINDThe Media Doesn’t Care. We Should.
Roy Hallums, the American civilian businessman abducted in Baghdad on November 1, 2004, is still missing.
A long time missing.
Never heard of him? I’m not surprised. Nor is Hallums’s family.
But maybe you have, since regular readers likely have taken notice of the days-in-captivity count I’ve been keeping in honor of Hallums at the top of the sidebar in the right-hand column of this blog for the last several months.
This tally, you may have surmised, is a deliberate recollection of the tragic score-keeping propagated by the likes of those much greater and more influential than I, throughout the Iranian hostage crisis (1979-1981), including Walter Cronkite and Ted Koppel, journalists whose day-to-day persistence was so relentless it has been credited by some historians with helping to unseat then-incumbent U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
Remarkably, the Orange County Register today broke the mainstream media’s near silence on the Hallums story, offering readers “Devoted Daughter,” by Zaheera Wahid, an 1,100-word article about the tireless efforts of Hallums’s daughter, Carrie Hallums Cooper, joined by his other daughter, Amanda, and his ex-wife, Susan Hallums, to remember and gain the freedom of the family patriarch.
The Hallums family’s frustration with the country’s fleeting attention span, the readiness of the media and the public to issue a collective shrug of the shoulders, come through loudly and clearly, and with considerable justification. Wahid writes:
"For one day, Roy Hallums was front-page news. He led TV news broadcasts, and the world watched as the worn and haggard man pleaded for his life in a video released by Iraqi insurgents holding him hostage. His daughter, Carrie Cooper, and ex-wife, Susan Hallums, did the New York talk-show circuit, begging for help to find him. But just as quickly as Hallums became the day’s top story, his desperate situation was overshadowed by the next day’s news. And since Jan. 25, the day the video was released, no one has heard about Roy Hallums."
...
June 4, 2005
Bye Y'all
Erin Go Bartow! Will be spending the rest of June in Ireland, with little if any blogging. Stay weird! Warmest wishes, especially to Siva and Melissa.
The Politics of Intermediation: Bookstore Payola
"Cash Up Front" by RANDY KENNEDY
"If you walk around any Barnes & Noble or other large bookseller right about now, there's a good chance you will notice prominent stacks of a thick hardcover with an eye-catching jacket and the title ''Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power.'' The book, written by a former Clinton administration official, David J. Rothkopf, and published by PublicAffairs, is based on interviews with foreign policy insiders like Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice, and offers itself as a definitive study of the council, sometimes called the most powerful group of people in the history of the world.
"Like many other customers, you might have thought the book was on display simply because the booksellers believed it was important, particularly relevant now and would practically sell itself.
"This is also what Peter Osnos, the chief executive of PublicAffairs, would like to think. But he has been in the publishing business long enough to know that it's never that simple. In order to ensure the book was on display on the front tables, his company had to pay a total of about $11,000 to the large bookstore chains. Last fall the company also paid what Osnos called ''a significant amount of money'' for prominent placement of a new boxed edition of Lou Cannon's two-volume biography of Ronald Reagan, after the former president died in June.
''Had we not done that,'' Osnos said recently, ''there's no guarantee where the book would be. It could have been in the back somewhere.''
"Osnos takes great pains to stress that he is not complaining about the arrangement, but simply describing a complicated kind of machinery that has evolved over the last 15 years in the world of American bookselling. Over that period, the amount of retail space devoted to selling books has quadrupled -- from superstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders to the growing book sections of big-box stores like Wal-Mart and Costco, and even of supermarkets. And with this expansion the once humble conventions of book display -- the neighborhood bookstore window, the recommended-books table near the cash register -- have also been supersized beyond recognition. In fact, many publishers say that the tables and flashy cardboard displays that crowd the front of chain bookstores have emerged as a marketing force fully as powerful as the traditional ways of trying to bring a book to the public's hard-won attention -- through newspaper and magazine ads, reviews, author tours and radio and television interviews.
"But this promotional device, like most others, comes with a cost. It is known, somewhat deceptively, as a cooperative advertising agreement. In plain terms, it means that many of the books on display at the front of a store or placed face out at the end of an aisle are there because the publisher paid for them to be there, not necessarily because anyone at the bookstore thought the book was noteworthy or interesting.
"Under such programs, booksellers -- mostly chains, but also larger independent stores -- keep a certain percentage of a publisher's net sales, usually 3 percent to 5 percent annually, depending on the agreement with the publisher. This money is then parceled out for various purposes, to help, for example, defray the bookseller's advertising costs, when a chain takes out ads or prints fliers to promote certain books. But the publisher's money may also buy coveted space on the store's front tables or on tall, highly visible racks, known as stepladders, announcing to customers that these books are considered the most important in the store.
''The Barnes & Noble stepladder is the best piece of real estate there is,'' said one veteran publishing executive -- who, like most others interviewed for this article, did not want his name used when talking about the world of book display. ''Now, when I go into a store I practically genuflect in front of the stepladder.'' (As an example, he said that one of his books with sales of about 800 copies a week immediately jumped to 3,000 to 4,000 copies a week once he paid for its placement on stepladders in stores across the country.)
"Pay-for-display programs are nothing new in the retail world. Supermarkets have long extracted money from manufacturers to put their boxes of cereal or detergent in eye-catching spots. But the practice seems less savory in bookselling, where bookstore owners and managers were once assumed to serve as an editorial presence, recommending and featuring books they liked. Besides, publishers complain that, despite its name, cooperative advertising is not a cooperative exercise in the least. Some compare it to a tax or even to extortion -- evoking the practice of ''payola'' in the radio industry. Which is not to say that co-op is actually under-the-table, illegal or even unethical -- it's just that bookstores don't tell customers about it.
"Co-op advertising has thus acquired a reputation as a kind of dirty secret of the publishing business. In 1999, Amazon.com, which also charges publishers for prominent placement and promotion of books on its Web site, dealt with complaints about the policy by saying it would disclose which titles had been paid for, but it has since stopped doing so. A disclaimer on the site (it takes some searching to find) informs customers that Amazon accepts payments, but, it adds, ''We don't sell our reviews -- and we don't say a book is good just because it's a publisher-supported title.'' Barnes & Noble likewise says that while its ''Discover Great New Writers'' program is supported by money from publishers, the company would never allow a publisher to ''buy'' a spot on this list; it reserves the right to choose the books itself.
"Trying to get publishers or booksellers to talk about display agreements, even off the record, is like trying to persuade Mafiosi to break the oath of omertá. One respected New York publishing executive contacted by this reporter couldn't get off the phone fast enough when asked about it. But among themselves, publishers complain bitterly that display programs are just another way that the big bookstores are dictating how they do business. Booksellers, meanwhile, hate to talk about display arrangements because they feel that they have been unfairly portrayed as somehow dishonest or mercenary in a highly competitive business with paper-thin profit margins.
''At no point in time do we put a book on display unless we think it's going to sell,'' said Stephen Riggio, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble, who bristled at questions about the practice. Gregory P. Josefowicz, the chief executive of Borders Group -- which has a chain of about 500 bookstores -- agreed. ''If we just keep displaying things that don't meet customer needs but are there because of the availability of co-op, that would be a bad strategy,'' he said. He didn't dispute the prevalence of co-op, however, noting that he and other booksellers felt that sharing some display costs with publishers was justified. ''Space does cost,'' he said.
''The rearrangement of the products in the store by store staff is an investment in money for us,'' Josefowicz added.
"The phenomenon of co-op advertising was born during the Depression, when book sales dropped sharply and publishers and bookstores willingly joined hands to share advertising and promotion costs. Later, when sales improved, some booksellers insisted on keeping the agreements. ''And that was the first step down the slippery slope from many publishers' points of view,'' said one publishing executive with more than 20 years' sales experience. For years, as bookselling remained largely in the hands of independent stores, pay-for-display was rare, but with the rise of chains and the explosion of display space the arrangements have become more complex and costly.
"Publishers have had a love-hate relationship with the idea almost from the beginning. ''I have to say that there were probably some publishers at the time who saw someone else's book in the front window and thought, 'Hey, I'd pay for that if I could,' '' said the veteran executive. And indeed now, displays in superstores are seen by some publishers, especially smaller houses, as an increasingly reliable way to promote their books. ''The promotions cost a fair amount,'' said George Gibson, the publisher of Walker & Company -- known for making successful books like Dava Sobel's ''Longitude'' -- ''but you're buying space, and they have every right to sell that space, and in this day and age when there are so many books being published -- literally every day -- the trick is to try to get a book to stand out in the crowd.''
"He added, of the agreements, ''Sure, it might be nice if they cost less, but you use them judiciously.''
"The veteran publishing executive said he believes that in many Barnes & Noble superstores, about 70 percent of the books on front-of-store tables are there because co-op money secures their spot. (In New York City, the percentage is less because store clerks have traditionally retained more autonomy to promote books they personally like and think will sell well.) Stephen Riggio declined to say what percentage of books on display tables in Barnes & Noble were generally part of cooperative programs, but maintained that it was ''a small amount system-wide'' and added that ''it's not the driving force behind our merchandising.''
"But many publishers disagree and say that costs for certain types of display arrangements with large booksellers are becoming too high. Numbers are very hard to come by, but some publishers said that the price for placement on front-of-store promotional tables for only a few weeks or a month -- in some cases, even, just one week -- at Barnes & Noble stores can be between $10,000 and $20,000 per book, depending on the time of year. Placement on eye-catching cardboard displays can cost much more than $20,000. When compared to the cost of advertising, those fees are not inordinately large, but publishers say that they are starting to take a bigger and bigger share of the money set aside to promote books.
''A great deal of our marketing money is now going to co-op,'' said one publisher. He added that he also has experienced more pressure from booksellers. They do not openly threaten to hide the book in the store if no cooperative money is used, he said; the stores obviously also want books to sell. But that threat is sometimes implicit. ''They're not rude,'' he said. ''They just don't promote the book.''
"And booksellers are going after even relatively small amounts of additional money from publishers. One publisher tells a story of a major bookselling company offering a chance for one of the publisher's noted authors to address a dinner meeting of the company's senior managers, a great opportunity for the author. But the bookseller demanded $5,000 from the publisher to allow the author to speak. The offer was declined. ''It's an aggressive posture,'' the publisher said.
"While publishers disagree about the merits of paying for display, one thing about the arrangements is clear: they further concentrate money and attention on the books that need it least.
"The phenomenon, which has been called a reverse Robin Hood effect, happens because publishers pay huge advances to star authors and then feel they must support that author's book with substantial promotion money. Of course, this was happening well before bookstore display emerged as a force. But publishers say that display arrangements have made promotion budgets even more lopsided in favor of the Stephen Kings and Danielle Steels of the book world, meaning that new authors or less prominent books are given increasingly little advertising or display help.
"Stephen Riggio said that while prominent authors do get heavy display support from publishers, he believes big booksellers are unfairly charged with hurting smaller books and publishers with their display policies. ''It's just another j'accuse story in which we are painted by some people in publishing as limiting the marketplace,'' he said. ''It gets right to me.''
"On the contrary, he argues, the expansion of his company's stores gives it ''the ability to stock the most diverse collection of books that we've ever been able to do.'' That means books by small and medium-size publishers are ''getting more exposure than ever before.''
"The publishing executive with 20 years in sales said that he has been part of many discussions in which marketing divisions have debated the wisdom of devoting large sums of display money to big-name authors whose books would sell well anyway, instead of putting it toward good smaller books that need the attention.
''Those conversations have occurred time and time again,'' he said. ''But no one has had the guts'' to gamble on the lesser-known titles. ''Nobody will do that because the risk is too great for losing the amount of money you've invested in Stephen King.''
"Peter Osnos said that for small publishers like him -- PublicAffairs puts out around 50 new books a year -- the expensive world of bookstore display forces him to try to find other ways to get his books talked about.
''One way is to hand a retailer a large check and they will stick your book up front,'' he said. ''What I have to be is more intrepid.''
''Money is the easiest way,'' he added, ''but it's not the only way.''
Cat Based versus Conventional Alarm Clocks
Cat Based Alarm Clock will not fail to wake you in the morning, even if the electricity has gone out. Cat Based Alarm Clock may wake you several times during the night as well.
Cat Based Alarm Clock is warm and furry, and emits gently purring noise. Cat Based Alarm Clock completely relentless, and lacks a snooze button.
Cat Based Alarm Clock environmentally friendly, excepting the small catachable creature portion of the environment, to which he is fatal. Cat Based Alarm Clock ultimately biodegradable, but has tendency to create massive toxic waste Superfund-style clean up sites in the litter box.
Cat Based Alarm Clock has fishy breath, which will remind you of the importance of good oral hygiene. Cat Based Alarm Clock never brushes teeth, and will yawn in your face at every opportunity.
Mimi Smartypants Has a Beef!
"There I was, at a baby shower. Although I do not enjoy these type of events, particularly when the majority of the participants are so blonde and girly and sundress-bedecked and adorable that I feel I should be over in the corner stomping grapes and giving everyone the Evil Eye, the shower was in honor of a good friend of mine (and her fetus), so I sucked it up and went to the Drake for high tea and exclaiming over little pastel outfits. And really, it wasn't that bad. In fact, it was highly amusing! Because of Beef Woman!
"Talk at the baby shower naturally drifted toward children and the raising thereof. I have a two-year-old girl, Beef Woman has a two-year old girl. However, in case her highlighted hair and strappy sandals vs. my dishevelment and combat boots didn't clue you in, our approaches to life and parenting could not have been more different. It was as if she had been paid to study my opinions on bedtimes, food, television, Disney Princess crap, education, and discipline, and to then take the exact opposite stand. The contrast was so extreme that I was left feeling not so much judgmental as awestruck at the diversity of parenthood.
"The only thing that got to me was her constant return to the topic of beef. Whenever I tuned back in to her conversation, she was mentioning beef. Her daughter is a picky eater, but at least she eats beef. It's difficult to work all day and come home and prepare meals, so she makes a lot of beef on the weekends and freezes it. They went to a wedding and her kid wouldn't eat much of anything except for the beef. The daughter finished all her beef so she got to have ice cream (no word on whether it was beef flavor). Costco often has big sales on beef. Her favorite of the tea sandwiches was the one with roast beef. I began to suspect this woman was a secret buzz marketer for the Beef Board, and I also began to suspect that I would start flinging scones around and screaming like an insane baboon if I had to hear the word "beef" one more time."
June 3, 2005
Online Book Club to Discuss Code
Ed Felten reports:
"Freedom to Tinker is hosting an online book club discussion of Lawrence Lessig’s book Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Lessig has created a wiki (an online collaborative space) with the text of the book, and he is encouraging everyone to edit the wiki to help create a new edition of the book.
"You can buy a paper version of the book from Amazon [Ann's note: Or from an independent bookstore!] or read it online for free.
"We’ll read one or two chapters each week, and we’ll discuss what we read on the main Freedom to Tinker blog."
Can't breathe because you volunteered at The Pile after 9/11? Your President says Tough.
Now that he's been re-elected using the terror of "September 11, September 11, September 11"
the promises Bush made to the New York City firefighters, rescue workers and police can be broken.
What an honorable man.
June 2, 2005
The Intelligent Designer is up to no good
New Scientist News - Can Tamiflu save us from bird flu?
H5N1 is acquiring the ability of spread more easily among people.
Sickening
From Stem Cell Opponents, an Embryo Crusade - New York Times
The hypocrisy, selfishness, and bigotry of these people is revolting. The insanity is amusing.
Miss Poppy Has Outdone Herself This Time
"Accessory kit includes everything your Jesus Action Figure will need to mount a successful military campaign against His enemies and those of the One True God (TM). Includes helmet with an American flag sticker, a rifle, a sidearm, a grenade, and a knife. Six items in all. You will need to affix them to your action figure with the adhesive of your choice."
Buy it here. "Spend your TRUE Christian Dollars at MissPoppy.com, where even your MONEY is saved!"
Will This Give Santorum Ideas?
Many more Slowpoke cartoons here.
June 1, 2005
Phone Thong
Funny? Offensive?
No One Bought The Ring at E-Bay
Possibly the photos were a turn-off, but I tend to think it could have been the associated commentary. Via Chaos Theory.
Actual Volvo Ad
The Google Deal
I am writing a paper/talk about the Google deal with libraries. I could use your help. What are the major questions/issues that this deal raise for the public? For libraries? For publishers? Overall, good for humans or bad?
The Chronicle of Higher Education did a big package on this thing. I pasted the text of one of the dialogues after the jump.
One College Librarian Worries About 'Atomizing' Books ...
Two librarians present opposing views: Michael Gorman and John P. Wilkin***
One College Librarian Worries About 'Atomizing' Books ...
Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association, has become a vocal critic of Google's library project. Mr. Gorman, who is dean of library services at California State University at Fresno, argues that the growing popularity of Google's search engine among scholars could harm research because even after Google expands its collection with book content, the search engine will have far less to offer than many traditional libraries. And because Google will make available only short excerpts of copyrighted works, he says the tool will be of limited value.
Q. What's wrong with Google's scanning millions of library books and adding them to its search engine?
A. If you're going to spend millions of dollars and you're interested in getting research materials to scholars, wouldn't it be better for Google to spend money improving their own business? ... Wouldn't it be better for them to work on, quote, cataloging the Web, so you can get the kind of results you get from a library catalog?
The second big objection to me is that they say they're digitizing books, but they're really not, they're atomizing them. In other words, they're reducing books to a collection of paragraphs and sentences which, taken out of context, have virtually no meaning. They may contain some data, but it's of very marginal utility. I mean, my view is that a scholarly book is an exposition. It begins at the beginning and ends at the end. It cumulatively adds to your knowledge of a topic and presents an argument.
Q. But can't these scanned volumes help readers find books in the physical library?
A. A much more efficient way to find books on topics is to use any of the huge union catalogs that exist. I mean, you can go to the Library of Congress catalog ... and you can search using their subject headings and find an enormous amount of literature on any topic you want and then borrow it. ... There's a huge amount of noise in Google, and library catalogs are more or less free from noise.
Q. Is there a perception by some Google users that they are getting a more comprehensive answer than they are?
A. That's exactly right, and that's the common delusion of undergraduates everywhere. They think that in using Google, they're getting relevant materials and a sufficiency of relevant materials to write papers and to do research -- and it's simply not true.
Q. Some of your colleagues argue that libraries should become more user-friendly, and that they should change with the times.
A. Libraries are user-friendly, and we have changed. I've been in libraries for 40 years, and they've changed unutterably. Go to any campus, and the library is likely to be the most technologically advanced unit on campus. ... That does not mean that everything can be dumbed down to some kind of hip-hop or bells-and-whistles kind of stuff. It just can't be. If you want to know about the dynasties of China, you're going to have to read a book. In fact, you're going to have to read several books.
Q. Are you concerned that as more books are scanned, fewer libraries will keep hard copies?
A. That is a real concern because maintaining large collections of books is an expensive endeavor. ... There's no money to be made out of supplying scholars with old scholarly texts. And, you know, if you build a gigantic electronic archive, sooner or later the governor of your state or the president of your university or somebody in Congress -- some jackass -- is going to say, Look, only three people have used this section of this digital database in the last year, why are we spending money keeping it?
Q. Why do you think there is so much interest in the Google project?
A. Beats me. Librarians are as faddish as the next people. We've had these fads before, by the way. There was a point at which audiovisual materials were the thing. There was another point when we were going to carry the Library of Congress around in a briefcase because it would be on ultrafiche and you could just take out any text you want and read it on your special reader on your way home on the bus. You know, these things come and go, and usually the technology finds its level and finds its appropriate role. All I'm saying is for data, for short texts, even for articles, I think electronic communication is probably the future. But I don't see any reason to abandon a technology like the book, which has served us so well.
***
... While Another Cheers the Project On
The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor was the first college to join Google's library project. Michigan officials began discussions with Google about two years ago, and the company quietly began scanning books last July. Under the terms of the arrangement, the university gets a digital copy of every book scanned, and can use those copies to offer services online -- as long as it doesn't sell the copies to a competitor of Google. John P. Wilkin, an associate university librarian, says Michigan's library is still deciding what it will do with the digital copies of its 7.8 million books.
Q. How do you respond to the general fear that the Google collection could replace the library?
A. The library is more than a collection of books. It's about connecting users with information. ... We have a very, very significant collections budget here at Michigan, and we spend roughly 25 percent of that on electronic resources. That's millions of dollars, and we have more than just about any institution in terms of electronic resources available to our users -- and they use them. And yet, at the same time, people are coming to the library in greater numbers. Our gate count goes up, our circulation stays high, and we think this is a very interesting paradox. The library as place is a growing concept, and people come together to use resources with other people even though they can access the resources remotely in many cases. We think a lot of that is about service and the work that we do with our community.
Q. How many books have you scanned so far?
A. We're not supposed to talk about numbers. ... At this point, the scale has been larger than anything that we've done before.
Q. How soon do you think the university will make the scanned books available?
A. We're at least a year off. We've got a number of irons in the fire that we need to attend to, and so for the near term we need to curate that material carefully. We need to get it into secure storage and make sure that we can begin that process of sustaining the material in perpetuity. But Google will be putting the materials online, too, so that removes some pressure from us. We can, like the rest of the world, rely on Google's search services.
Q. Do you plan to work with other universities to build a joint digital collection?
A. We've had a number of discussions, and in some ways very openly, with natural partners. For example, the University of Michigan is part of a group called the CIC, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation -- it's the Big Ten and the University of Chicago -- and we just had some discussions about trying to find a point of intersection there the other day. So some of this is quite natural.
Q. Are you confident that the digital formats you are getting from Google will be good enough to last?
A. I think that's a good way of characterizing it. They are, in fact, good enough to last. I know there's a lot of worry and skepticism in this space, but there's just a lot that we've done over more than a decade in the library community on issues around adequate means of capture and reliable file formats. ... So we have a lot of confidence in the methods and the formats that we use, and we were able to inject our experience into the discussions with Google.
Q. Are you concerned at all that the scanning process could damage the books?
A. I can say with absolute honesty that [Google's scanners] handle the materials more gently than use of the materials by readers. The book doesn't need to be opened as much, and that's a key piece. Our books are there to be used, and this will be gentler to the materials than normal use of the materials. So we feel good about that.
http://chronicle.com
Section: Information Technology
Volume 51, Issue 39, Page A25
ADVICE FROM A PUBLIC DEFENDER?
This was posted at Craig's List. I repost it here because though most of it made me cringe, the last paragraph ("beneath the fold" - click the link to access the second half) really zapped me. See what you think.
First, let me say I love my job and it is a privilege to work for my clients. I wish I could do more for them. That being said, there are a few things that need to be discussed.
You have the right to remain silent. So SHUT THE FUCK UP. Those cops are completely serious when they say your statements can and will be used against you. There’s just no need to babble on like it’s a drink and dial session. They are just pretending to like you and be interested in you.
When you come to court, consider your dress. If you’re charged with a DUI, don’t wear a Budweiser shirt. If you have some miscellaneous drug charge, think twice about clothing with a marijuana leaf on it or a t-shirt with the “UniBonger” on it. Long sleeves are very nice for covering tattoos and track marks. Try not to be visibly drunk when you show up.
Consider bathing and brushing your teeth. This is just as a courtesy to me who has to stand by you in court. Smoking 5 generic cigarettes to cover up your bad breath is not the same as brushing. Try not to cough and spit on my while you speak and further transmit your strep, flu, and hepatitis A through Z.
I’m a lawyer, not your fairy godmother. I probably won’t find a loophole or technicality for you, so don’t be pissed off. I didn’t beat up your girlfriend, steal that car, rob that liquor store, sell that crystal meth, or rape that 13 year old. By the time we meet, much of your fate has been sealed, so don’t be too surprised by your limited options and that I’m the one telling you about them.
Don’t think you’ll improve my interest in your case by yelling at me, telling me I’m not doing anything for you, calling me a public pretender or complaining to my supervisor. This does not inspire me, it makes me hate you and want to work with you even less.
It does not help if you leave me nine messages in 17 minutes. Especially if you leave them all on Saturday night and early Sunday morning. This just makes me want to stab you in the eye when we finally meet.
For the guys: Don’t think I’m amused when you flirt or offer to “do me.” You can’t successfully rob a convenience store, forge a signature, pawn stolen merchandise, get through a day without drinking, control your temper, or talk your way out of a routine traffic stop. I figure your performance in other areas is just as spectacular, and the thought of your shriveled unwashed body near me makes me want to kill you and then myself.
For the girls: I know your life is rougher than mine and you have no resources. I’m not going to insult you by suggesting you leave your abusive pimp/boyfriend, that you stop taking meth, or that your stop stealing shit. I do wish you’d stop beating the crap out of your kids and leaving your needles out for them to play with because you aren’t allowing them to have a life that is any better than yours.
For the morons: Your second grade teacher was right – neatness counts. Just clean up! When you rob the store, don’t leave your wallet. When you drive into the front of the bank, don’t leave the front license plate. When you rape/assault/rob a woman on the street, don’t leave behind your cell phone. After you abuse your girlfriend, don’t leave a note saying that you’re sorry.
If you are being chased by the cops and you have dope in your pocket – dump it. These cops are not geniuses. They are out of shape and want to go to Krispy Kreme and most of all go home. They will not scour the woods or the streets for your 2 grams of meth. But they will check your pockets, idiot. 2 grams is not worth six months of jail.
Don’t be offended and say you were harassed because the security was following you all over the store. Girl, you were wearing an electronic ankle bracelet with your mini skirt. And you were stealing. That’s not harassment, that’s good store security.
And those kids you churn out: how is it possible? You’re out there breeding like feral cats. What exactly is the attraction of having sex with other meth addicts? You are lacking in the most basic aspects of hygiene, deathly pale, greasy, grey-toothed, twitchy and covered with open sores. How can you be having sex? You make my baby-whoring crack head clients look positively radiant by comparison.
"I didn't put it all the way in." Not a defense.
"All the money is gone now." Not a defense
"The bitch deserved it." Not a defense.
"But that dope was so stepped on, I barely got high." Not a defense.
"She didn't look thirteen." Possibly a defense; it depends.
"She didn't look six." Never a defense, you just need to die.
For those rare clients that say thank-you, leave a voice mail, send a card or flowers, you are very welcome. I keep them all, and they keep me going more than my pitiful COLA increase.
For the idiots who ask me how I sleep at night: I sleep just fine, thank you. There's nothing wrong with any of my clients that could not have been fixed with money or the presence of at least one caring adult in their lives. But that window has closed, and that loss diminishes us all.
Global Warming: The Facts and the Scientific Literature
Two Altercation readers came to my defense today about my claim that human-influenced climate change is an undisputed fact, supported by the consensus, if not the unanimity, of the scientific literature:
Name: Kramer Hometown: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Dear Dr. Alterman: I'm not exactly sure what Brad's background is, or what the literature he's describing is, but, within the peer reviewed scientific literature, the fact of human induced climate change is taken as beyond dispute. A recent study in the journal Science makes this point pretty strongly. If you look in the Science Citation Index (a relatively authoritative index of the peer reviewed literature) between 1993 and 2003 using the keywords 'climate change' you get 928 results. Of these results there is not a single paper (right, that's 0/928) which argues that changes in climate over the last ~150 years are not influenced by human activity. There are, of course, some papers that take no position (say a paper that studies climate change in the Cenozoic). But, it's worth emphasizing again, everyone who published in the peer reviewed literature in this period who had an opinion about whether humans have caused 'global warming' believed they had. I lay no particular claim to have done this work myself (although I was a coauthor on one of those papers - I'm currently a PhD student in an Earth Sciences department) but just wanted to write in to emphasize that, if anything is settled in the Earth Sciences, this is it. There is (and to give him credit perhaps it is this to which Brad is referring) significant disagreement about the magnitude of the human influence on climate and its specifics (e.g. will Buffalo get more or less snow over the next 100 years than it has over the last) but there just isn't over the first question: have humans influenced the climate over the last ~150 years. Suggesting otherwise is incorrect.Name: Rick
Hometown: Iowa
Re: Brad's global warming.
Brad submits that he's read the oil-company sponsored studies, the religious kook studies, even the environmentalist (studies? diatribes?). Perhaps he should pick up an atmospheric chemistry text and a thermodynamics text. It's really quite simple. The more carbon is in the atmosphere, the more solar heat (energy) is retained in the atmosphere (the greenhouse effect, accepted by everyone other than the flat earth crowd). Simplistically speaking, weather and climate is the earth's way of dissipating/evening-out this energy (converting it to mechanical energy, for example). No one knows exactly how global climate change will manifest itself, but human impact on greenhouse gases is accepted and documented. The arguments occurring among those seriously involved in studying climate change have to do with the what/where/when and is it too late? The "does it" or "did we" argument is already settled. Sooner or later, it will become common knowledge that "global warming" is an unfortunate misnomer. Predicting tomorrow's high temperature will always be nearly impossible, but chaotic weather patterns (including altered ocean currents, ice-ages, drought, massive hurricanes) that will devastate, perhaps extinguish, Earth's species should be self-evident even to the most well read among us.
Copyright and the Surveillance State
Michael Geist tells us:
LA TO INSTALL MPAA FUNDED CAMERAS IN CITY DISTRICT
Los Angeles police and movie industry officials unveiled new surveillance cameras in downtown Los Angeles aimed at stemming the city's thriving bootleg DVD business. The MPAA donated $186,000 for the 10 pole-mounted cameras, which will monitor activity in the Fashion District.
This is part of a trend I have been tracking for some time: the convergence of surveillance and copyright enforcement. Not long ago the state and copyright holders let unsubstantial infringement occur (and thus benefited from the positive externalities of infringement) because the transaction costs of enforcement were too high. Much flew below radar.
Now, however, copyright holders can trace how their works move through the world with such precision that the cost of enforcement is very small. Thus we have all been drawn into the matrix of enforcement in ways we find surprising. Combine this with anti-Asian, anti-Moslem, anti-immigrant, security "theatre" mania, and general paranoia and you have a toxic mix of legal and cultural moves that threaten to deaden culture and expression at their roots.
For more on this, read this brilliant article by Sonia Katyal:
Abstract: A few years ago, it was fanciful to imagine a world where intellectual property owners - such as record companies, software owners, and publishers - were capable of invading the most sacred areas of the home in order to track, deter, and control uses of their products. Yet, today, strategies of copyright enforcement have rapidly multiplied, each strategy more invasive than the last. This new surveillance exposes the paradoxical nature of the Internet: It offers both the consumer and creator a seemingly endless capacity for human expression - a virtual marketplace of ideas - alongside an insurmountable array of capacities for panoptic surveillance. As a result, the Internet both enables and silences speech, often simultaneously.This paradox, in turn, leads to the tension between privacy and intellectual property. Both areas of law face significant challenges because of technology's ever-expanding pace of development. Yet courts often exacerbate these challenges by sacrificing one area of law for the other, by eroding principles of informational privacy for the sake of unlimited control over intellectual property. Laws developed to address the problem of online piracy - in particular, the DMCA - have been unwittingly misplaced, inviting intellectual property owners to create private systems of copyright monitoring that I refer to as piracy surveillance. Piracy surveillance comprises extrajudicial methods of copyright enforcement that detect, deter, and control acts of consumer infringement.
In the past, legislators and scholars have focused their attention on other, more visible methods of surveillance relating to employment, marketing, and national security. Piracy surveillance, however, represents an overlooked fourth area that is completely distinct from these other types, yet incompletely theorized, technologically unbounded, and, potentially, legally unrestrained. The goals of this Article are threefold: first, to trace the origins of piracy surveillance through recent jurisprudence involving copyright; second, to provide an analysis of the tradeoffs between public and private enforcement of copyright; and third, to suggest some ways that the law can restore a balance between the protection of copyright and civil liberties in cyberspace.
This paper was selected as the winning entry for the 2004 Yale Law School Cybercrime and Digital Law Enforcement Conference writing competition, sponsored by the Yale Law School Information Society Project and the Yale Journal of Law and Technology
Ed Felten's Book Club
Read about it here. He's considering starting with Lessig's "Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace."
Hello Democrats?
2004 Election Voting Data from the U.S. Census Bureau:
Women Voters -- 67,269,000
Men Voters -- 58,485,000
Total -- 125,754,000
Much more about these stats at Daily Kos, including the mystery of millions of missing votes.
Marketing Nondiscrimination
Read about the "Fair Employment" certification mark described at the Lessig blog, by guest blogger and Yale law prof Ian Ayres.
"Artlike Sex Toy" Blogging
At Raging PMS, and at Blowfish. Nothing at either blog about law review articles for some reason. If you are an easily offended doofus, or you are reading this at work on filtered/monitored Internet, or you are Siva's mother, probably best not to click the links. If you are a copyright geek, think about "sculptural works" and "functionality limitations."
Update: Michael Madison has linked to this post, and referenced copyright's "merger doctrine."