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 Friday, July 2, 2004
It's The Fear, Stupid!. Ok, I'm at work the other day. There are a few of us taking a break, having Ice Cream. Yes, that's right, we have Ice Cream breaks where I work, eat your heart out. Anyway, it was towards the end... [Open Source Politics]
Wouldn't it be nice to have a President who said that the only thing we had to fear is fear itself, rather than styrofoam coolers on the Fourth of July? The most powerful country in the world has people afraid to celebrate its birthday. And the government prefers it that way. 9:36:13 PM 
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Ouch. I'm always amazed about the degree to which ideological foes in DC can, once the cameras are off, talk nicely to each other. But, something tells me that after this exchange Begala and Novak aren't going to be having many civil conversations... [Eschaton]
How in the world can Novak even be allowed on the air today? His lies and obfuscations only serve one purpose, to mislead and misinform. WHen his exact workds are read back to him, he responds byt lying. What a great guy! Sine he is the one who outed an underecover CIA opperative at the behest of this Administration, I would think the word traitor could also be applied. 9:23:33 PM
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Big Brother Trucker
. Time magazine has a disturbing report on the "Highway Watch" program designed to put 400,000 truckers and the like on the lookout for terrorists:
Highway Watch, which will receive an additional $22 million next year, preserves the part of TIPS concerned [Orcinus]
Yeah. truckers are such good judges of who might be a terrorist. 'They were turbans.' 'They smell.' 'They don;t look like us.' And this gets $22 million. What a deal. 9:17:13 PM
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AWOL: The final analysis
. My old Table Talk cohort Paul Lukasiak -- whose research skills are top-notch, and whose judgment I've learned to implicitly trust -- has examined all the officially released documents relating to George W. Bush's service records and has just released the [Orcinus]
Read the report. He should get kudos just for wading through all the documents. But to place them in historical conetxt and lay them out... what a job. I wonder if this ai why the AP is trying to get the microfilm of his records? 9:13:28 PM
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Plans? We don't need no steenking plans!.
Un-frickin'-believable:
As attorneys for detainees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, began preparing the first of hundreds of expected lawsuits demanding that the government justify the detentions, administration officials acknowledged that they were unprepared for a rebuke in two landmark Supreme Court decisions that rejected the military's treatment of prisoners in the war on terrorism.
Now, after being handed the losses, the administration has been left to scramble to develop a strategy for granting hearings to detainees without having to cope with an unwieldy series of lawsuits throughout the nation.
"They didn't really have a specific plan for what to do, case by case, if we lost," a senior Department of Defense official said on condition of anonymity. "The Justice Department didn't have a plan. State didn't have a plan. This wasn't a unilateral mistake on Department of Defense's part. It's astounding to me that these cases have been pending for so long and nobody came up with a contingency plan."
[...]
An internal Justice Department memo reviewed Tuesday by the Los Angeles Times outlining communications plans in response to high court rulings on the issue listed two pages of talking points to be used "in case of win," and a page of talking points to be used "in case of win if some sort of process is required" -- a partial victory. Yet, there was no category for action in the event of a broad defeat in the memo, titled "Supreme Court Decision Communications Plan." They had pages of talking points, but no actual plans. Don't ya just love these guys? [Sid's Fishbowl]
Seems like this is a habit of this Administration. 8:59:41 PM
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November surprise?.
Voting Official Seeks Terrorism Guidelines:
The government needs to establish guidelines for canceling or rescheduling elections if terrorists strike the United States again, says the chairman of a new federal voting commission.
Such guidelines do not currently exist, said DeForest B. Soaries, head of the voting panel.
Soaries was appointed to the federal Election Assistance Commission last year by President Bush. Soaries said he wrote to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge in April to raise the concerns. So, if we vote, the terrorists have won?
(via Atrios) [Sid's Fishbowl]
Does he know something we don't? That sounds like something right out of 'Seven Days in May.' Maybe we should have a paranoid film festival? Seven Days in May. The Manchurian Candidate. The Parallax View. 8:57:49 PM
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The Ants of 9-11. One of the themes of Supernova is decentralization, and in preparation for the conference I've been rereading Steven Johnson's Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. I had a strange experience tonight where just before picking the book up I ran into this interesting op-ed, The Best Anti-Terror Force: Us in the Washington Post today arguing for the power of decentralization in so-called "homeland defense". On Sept. 11, 2001, American citizens saved the government, not the other way around ... While the U.S. air defense system did fail to halt the attacks, our improvised, high-tech citizen defense "system" was extraordinarily successful. Confronted by a cruel and diabolical surprise that day, those with formal responsibility for protecting our country from air attack could not defend us. ... This is not surprising given that the command-and-control structure required so many baton handoffs in the 77-minute response window between the crashes of the first and fourth terrorist aircraft. What is surprising is that an alternative defense system, one with no formal authority or security funding, did succeed, and probably saved our seat of government. The downing of United Flight 93 in Pennsylvania was a heroic feat executed by the plane's passengers. But it was more: the culmination of a strikingly efficient chain of responses by networked Americans. Requiring less time than it took the White House to gather intelligence and issue an attack order (which was in fact not acted on), American citizens gathered information from national media and relayed that information to citizens aboard the flight, who organized themselves and effectively carried out a counterattack against the terrorists, foiling their plans. Armed with television and cell phones, quick-thinking, courageous citizens who were fed information by loved ones probably saved the White House or Congress from devastation. It is an interesting take on decentralization. I'm not sure that I buy the whole argument, but it is a nice illustration of the power of decentralization, and how rapid a response you can get when people tied together in an efficient decentralized communications infrastructure can do what Johnson argues ants do, which is act locally based on local knowledge.... [Geodog's MT Weblog]
I missed this op-ed but it brings up a wonderful point. What saved the Capitol was not our government or its system of air defense. It was a group of networked people, working outside the hierarchy, using the social network to find a solution to a complex prolem. WHile Bush was sitting in a room for 7 menutes, while Rumsfeld was out of touch, while Cheney was making decisions based on faulty information, these people on Flight 93 used various modes of information gathering to decipher just what needed to be done. In a world of complexity and confusion, the only way to solve these problems is a network of diverse viewpoints with transparency and openess. Their decision was not hard, once the information was gathered. Something that seems to be lacking in the descriptions of this Administration on that day. (I'm not a believer yet in the 'it was shot down' theory of Flight 93. And even so, the people on the plane had regained control because of the networking.) 8:53:03 PM
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But it's not torture?. From the Washington Post report on the torture memos released today: On Oct. 11, 2002, for example, the commanding general at the Guantanamo Bay detention center, Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, asked his commander to approve the use of death threats against detainees and their families, wrapping a detainee in wet towels to "induce the misperception of suffocation," stress positions, exposing them to cold weather and water, and using dogs. These techniques had been reviewed and deemed legal under the Geneva Conventions by Dunlavey's legal adviser, Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, who wrote that they would be permissible "so long as there is an important governmental objective" and the tactics are not used "for the purpose of causing harm or with the intent to cause prolonged" mental or physical suffering. Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey and Lt. Col. Diane Beaver should have been involuntarily retired on October 12, 2002. Kudos to Gen. James T. Hill for not going along with the worst of these abuses. Still, is it any wonder why the whole world is suspicious of what is happening at the prison in Guantanamo?... [Geodog's MT Weblog]
'Wait. We found missiles and the Polish minister told me they had sarin in them. Or maybe it was mustard gas. That is not important. They are the WMD we have been looking for.'
This sort of feckless approach to the truth is why the idea of waterboarding someone, of making them believe they are going to drown, that wrapping them in wet towels to create the mispreception of suffocation (!!) is not torture. Considering that several of these prisoners have died in our custody, apparently while undergoing the 'non-torture' procedures, certainly indicates the gravity of the process. This is our government, our officials that are rationalizing this. The ends must justify the means. So, lying, torture, just about anything can be justified in order to keep the government in power.
8:45:24 PM
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Do not surf the web using Internet Explorer. Seriously. This is not just Open Source zealotry. It is dangerous to your financial security to use Internet Explorer to browse the web. From an article on CNET: Security researchers warned Web surfers on Thursday to be on their guard after uncovering evidence that widespread Web server compromises have turned corporate home pages into points of digital infection. The researchers believe that online organized crime groups are breaking into Web servers, surreptitiously inserting code that takes advantage of two flaws in Internet Explorer that Microsoft has not yet fixed. Those flaws allow the Web server to install a program that takes control of the user's computer.... ... This time, however, the flaws affect every user of Internet Explorer, because Microsoft has not yet released a patch. Moreover, the infectious Web sites are not just those of minor companies inhabiting the backwaters of the Web, but major firms, including some banks ... the malicious program uploaded to a victim's computer is not currently detected as a virus by most antivirus software. With no patch from Microsoft, that leaves Internet Explorer users vulnerable. ... That server uses the pair of Microsoft Internet Explorer vulnerabilities to upload and execute a remote access Trojan horse, RAT, to the victim's PC. The software records the victim's keystrokes and opens a backdoor in the system's security to allow the attacker to access the computer.. There are lots of other good choices for a browser. I am currently using Firefox 0.8, and find it much better than IE, especially after adding the Ad-block and Tabbrowser extensions. Highly recommended. Found via Techdirt.... [Geodog's MT Weblog]
I stopped using Internet Explorer long ago. I wonder if the Mac version also causes problems. How ironic if some institutions are brought down because of MS. I guess it will not be fun for the economy. The culmination of MS's 'just good enough' attitude could be an economic firestorm. How apt. 8:38:10 PM
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Dr. Jiang Yanyong, hero of the SARS epidemic, imprisoned in China. During the 2003 SARS epidemic, I did my best to stay out of the politics of SARS at SARS Watch Org, in order to be able to serve more people with helpful information, but there are times when I felt I had to speak up. Today I once again feel compelled to speak out, perhaps emboldened by the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday finally rejected Bush's tyrannical claim that the US government could indefinitely detain people incommunicado and without recourse to judicial review of their incarceration, so I now I don't feel like such a hypocrite talking about human right violations in other countries. According to several sources, the Chinese authorities have detained Dr. Jiang Yanyong, the retired surgeon, People's Liberation Army veteran, and long-time Communist Party member who was one of the heros of the SARS epidemic. As you may recall, at a time when the Chinese government was lying and denying that there were more than a handful of SARS cases in China, and was driving SARS patients around Beijing in ambulances to hide them from the World Health Organization, Dr. Jiang Yanyong wrote and signed a letter to the Beijing TV station and Time Magazine telling the truth about the magnitude of the SARS epidemic in Beijing. This simple act of truth telling did as much as any other act to stop the spread of SARS, and to begin the process of containing the epidemic. As I noted earlier, given that the party line became that the officials who concealed the SARS epidemic were the wrong doers, Dr. Jiang Yanyong was not punished for speaking out, and was even faintly praised in a People's Daily article. Apparently Dr. Jiang Yanyong has been truth-telling again, and the response of the authorities has been considerably harsher. In February he wrote a heart-felt and heart-rending letter to the Chair of the National People's Congress detailing his experiences as a surgeon on duty the night the troops started killing the students in Tiananmen Square, and calling for a reassessment of the June 4th Incident. A few quotes from the a translation of the letter, which is worth reading in its entirety: At about 2200 when I was in my dormitory, I heard continuous gunshots from the north. Several minutes later, my pager beeped. It was the emergency room's call. So I rushed there. I could not believe my eyes--lying... [Geodog's MT Weblog]
This is the sort of thing that should never happen in America. But scared people allow strong governments to do horrible things. And the only way the government can stay in power is to keep people scared. As Hermann Goring said, while in Nuremberg: 'Why, of course, the people don't want war,' Goering shrugged. 'Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.'
'There is one difference,' I pointed out. 'In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.'
'Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.'
[~] Hermann Goering, from Nuremberg Diary, by Gustave Gilbert. (Link to source.)
We are not there yet but the combination of an arrogant Executive branch and a weak, despotic Legislative branch seems to have been repeated throughout history with often horrifying consequences. The Price of Freedom Is Eternal Vigilance. 8:36:00 PM
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The Lies of George W. Bush. I had just spent an hour putting a list together, but the Center For American Progress has alread done so,... [The Poor Man]
Is lying worse than having oral sex? Which one kills more people, puts more countries into debt that will be paid by the next generations, or destroys the moral fabic of a commuity? Discuss. 8:17:09 PM
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Afternoon Lie. Lie: Gerhard [Schroeder] and I just had a very good meeting. The first thing I told him, I said, look,... [The Poor Man]
Is it a lie or just stretching the truth, misrepresentation or misleading? 8:13:58 PM
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The wrong man. A Florida Division of Elections database lists more than 47,000 people the department said may be ineligible to vote because of felony records. The state is directing local elections offices to check the list and scrub felons from voter rolls.
But a Herald review shows that at least 2,119 of those names — including 547 in South Florida — shouldn’t be on the list because their rights to vote were formally restored through the state’s clemency process….
State elections officials acknowledge there may be mistakes on the list but insist they have built in safeguards to make sure eligible voters are not removed by local election offices. They say they have warned election offices to be diligent before eliminating voters, and have flagged possible cases in which voters on the list may have regained their rights….
Of the 2,119 people who obtained clemency, 62 percent are registered Democrats, and almost half are black. Less than 20 percent are Republican. Those ratios are very close to the same in the list of 47,000 voters who the local elections officers are supposed to review and possibly purge from the registration rolls.
As it turns out, justice delayed is, in fact, justice denied. The list was released yesterday, and the Miami Herald has already found this. I feel a case of the shrill coming on.
Via Body and Soul. [Crooked Timber]
Just think, we would have a different President today if someone had done their job in 2000 and prevented innocent people from being denied the right to vote in Florida. I love the fact that 62% of the incorrect names are Democrats. They would have just shown up to vote and been told too bad. By the time things were corrected, it would be too late. I guess they will have to find a different approach this year. Maybe electronic voting machines with no paper trail? 8:07:11 PM
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F is for Photoshopped.  Researchers at Dartmouth University have developed an algorithm to automatically detect when a digital photo has been manipulated. Their statistical technique is based on the fact that altering an image messes with the hidden mathematics inside the photo.
"There is little doubt that counter-measures will be developed to foil our detection schemes," says Farid. "Our hope, however, is that as more authentication tools are developed it will become increasingly more difficult to create convincing digital forgeries."
Difficult, but not impossible, hopes the Weekly World News.
Link
[Boing Boing]
Algorithms to detect manipulated digital photos sounds like something very useful. Special effects are getting so good that they can make lies seem like the truth, especially in the hands of people who have a hard time with the truth. But I do like the photo! 8:02:29 PM
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Capital Games: I'm Attacked by the 'New York Times'!. Columnist says calling Bush a liar is--gasp!--soooo Bush-like. [The Nation Weblogs]
Why is is better to believe that Bush is deluded and has lost contact with reality than that he is a liar? The contortions some people have to go through. Is it a lie if you believe it is the truth? How about if you should know what the truth is but choose to ignore it? This administration has said, and continues to say, things that have just enough connection with reality to serve their purposes.
The latest is the 17 shells the Poles found in Iraq. We, the US military, examined them and found that all but 2 were empty of any WMD. The two had such small amounts, and had decayed so much, that they offered no danger. These 'weapons' may be 20 years old. Now remember, our own military had done the tests to show these were not harmful and were likely buried many years ago.
So what does Rumsfeld do? He gets up and states that WMDs have been found by the Poles, just like he said. He found this out from the Polish minister. Has he talked with our own miitary or does he make policy based on gossip with other dignitaries? The choices seem to be that he is either lying or he is incompetant. I would prefer to believe that our Secretary of Defense is misleading , is lying, to further his own political ends, than that he is incompetant. Misleading when you know the truth, when you try to create the opposite impression from what you know to be true, can only be called lying.
We all know what lying is. Just like we know porn when we see it. The inability of these guys to show any hint that their statements may be tinged with the least amount of dishonesty, to display an arrogance that simply because they say it makes it 'truthful', is one of the things i dislike about this Administration. Remember, Nixon never lied. He just mis-spoke! Mis-speech seems to be the lingua franca of this Administration. 7:33:36 PM
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