Friday, December 27, 2002

By The Associated Press via New York Times - free registration required Personal Information Taken From Military. Thieves who broke into a government contractor's office snatched computer hard drives containing Social Security numbers, addresses and other records of about 500,000 members of the military and their families. The company, Phoenix-based TriWest Healthcare Alliance, provides managed health care to the military in 16 states, including Minnesota. It serves about 1.1 million active-duty personnel, their dependents and retirees. [Privacy Digest] One of the many royal proclamations executive orders signed by Clinton in the last days of his administration (and subsequently approved by Bush) ended healthcare privacy by requiring records to be turned over to the government on demand. With that in mind, it's informative to see how the government takes care of its own employees' healthcare records. comment () trackback ()  9:50:38 PM     Cloning claim prompts call for ban. The claim by a company to have produced the world's first cloned baby sparks calls for cloning to be outlawed in the US. [BBC News | Front Page | UK Edition] It's not clear yet if the claims are true, but if so this is very good news. Fortunately it's impossible for Luddites in any one country to outlaw science. The real danger to progress is from Tranzis with their UN and international treaties. comment () trackback ()  8:03:41 PM     Knitting Afghanistan. The United States is--rightfully--required to defend our waging of foreign wars before world opinion on grounds other than that we merely felt like wreaking havoc. A humanitarian urge to make life better for the citizens of the nations we assault has been used as a cloak to cover U.S. military escapades in every war since WWII. This sort of international welfare state argument has never been entirely convincing to minimal-staters to begin with--if a domestic welfare state is an illegitimate function of a government whose purpose is to defend its citizens' lives, liberty, and property, then why is a worldwide one, with aerial bombing no less, any better? But even at face value, ensuring that everything will be better once the U.S. Army has kicked some ass demands a level of understanding of the nuances and dynamics of foreign nations and cultures, and a potentially almost eternal commitment (U.S. troops tend to stay put once sent somewhere), that requires a lot of heavy thinking--as well as a fair amount of existential despair over the occasional immutability of human perfidy and misery. Those salivating at the thought of bombs over Baghdad need to remember that cleaning up after a fun party like that is long and arduous. The results might not be anything we'd have a reason to be proud of, either. [Reason Magazine] comment () trackback ()  4:35:22 PM     Suicide Bombers Kill 46 in Chechnya [AP World News] Interesting that there are many references to terrorism in this story, even though it was a legitimate attack on a military target--unlike the PLO terrorist bombers who are always referred to as "militants." comment () trackback ()  4:04:49 PM

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