I pledge allegiance to .... Herr Bush?

One Nation Under Bush - At a campaign rally, Republicans recite the "Bush Pledge." By Chris Suellentrop

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla.—"I want you to stand, raise your right hands," and recite "the Bush Pledge," said Florida state Sen. Ken Pruitt. The assembled mass of about 2,000 in this Treasure Coast town about an hour north of West Palm Beach dutifully rose, arms aloft, and repeated after Pruitt: "I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States.

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Arms aloft eh? With elbows bent, or straight?

Bush did wear something

Salon.com News | NASA photo analyst: Bush wore a device during debate

I've mostly been ignoring this, but now I'm curious. I'd put it at a 50-50 chance Bush was wearing something at the first debate. I've no idea what it was and the article really doesn't address that.

Republicans for Kerry 2004

Republicans for Kerry 2004 - dKosopedia

An extensive list of well regarded Republicans who will not vote for Bush. Some will vote for Kerry, some will write in McCain or George Bush senior.

Bob Smith, a right wing NH republican, joined this group today.

Yesterday The Economist endorsed Kerry.

Go Sox Go.

Kay (the weapons inspector guy) on Qa Qaa (via CNN)

The Talent Show: An Expert Opinion

Well, at least with regard to this one bunker and the film shows one seal, one bunker, one group of soldiers going through and there were others there that were sealed, with this one, I think it is game, set and match.

There was HMX, RDX in there. The seal was broken and quite frankly to me the most frightening thing is not only is the seal broken and the lock broken but the soldiers left after opening it up. I mean to rephrase the so-called (UNINTELLIGIBLE) rule if you open an arms bunker, you own it. You have to provide security....

...Iraq had, and it's a frightening number, two-thirds of the total conventional explosives that the U.S. has in its entire inventory. The country was an armed camp.

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Bush can blame the soldiers. Who else can he blame?

Butterfly ballots -- what a nation

Pandagon: Follow The Rules, You Will Lose

I've never seen a butterfly ballot. These are astounding. We don't deserve this nation.

Yoo-hoo, don't forget me ...

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Bin Laden video threatens America

So he's not dead. Too bad, I thought he might be.

I don't think he's trying to seriously influence the election. If I can't figure out how this spins I doubt Zawahiri can.

I think either:

1. It's a signal for havoc
2. It's a sign of bin Laden's infamous vanity

We'll find out soon enough about the first. If nothing happens it suggests al Qaeda does not have much threat left in it -- at least for the US.

The Lancet: 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Iraq death toll 'soared post-war'

... Violent deaths were mainly attributed to coalition forces - and most individuals reportedly killed were women and children.

Dr Les Roberts, who led the study, said: "Making conservative assumptions we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more, have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most of the violent deaths."

He said his team's work proved it was possible to compile data on public health "even during periods of extreme violence".

The sample included randomly selected households in Baghdad, Basra, Arbil, Najaf and Karbala, as well as Falluja.

Lancet editor Richard Horton said: "With the admitted benefit of hindsight and from a purely public health perspective, it is clear that whatever planning did take place was grievously in error."

He went on: "Democratic imperialism has led to more deaths not fewer. This political and military failure continues to cause scores of casualties among non-combatants."

He urges the coalition forces to rethink their strategy to "prevent further unnecessary human casualties".

"For the sake of a country in crisis and for a people under daily threat of violence, the evidence we publish today must change heads as well as pierce hearts," he said.

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I wouldn't bet on piercing hearts. I suspect many soldiers already have pain in their hearts at the civilian deaths, but for most Americans it's an annoying astraction.

100,000. That's a city. It's much more than all the people I know. If the average victim weighed 60 lbs, than's 6 million pounds of person.

If the average victim was 12 years old, that's at least 5,000,000 lost years of life. Five million years ago we didn't even have Homo Erectus.

By the standards of the Iran-Iraq war, Rwanda, and the Congo, of course, it's a small number. It may yet be dwarfed by the deaths of a future Iraqi civil war.

By the standards of a civilized society ...

There are times when I would say war is unavoidable. (I might be wrong.) If it must be done, then do it with maximum care and the least harm possible. Treat children, at the least, as we would treat our own children.

We did not have the forces to invade Iraq "responsibly". We did not have the support of the world needed to find a way to get out of Iraq quickly. Rumsfeld was either delusional about the consequences of his choices, or he made an evil choice for evil ends. Bush did not fire Rumsfeld, evidently he approved.

If this were a just world they would be tried for crimes against humanity. Any educated adult, capable of reading and thinking, who votes for Bush November 2nd is also indicating they approve as well.

Wag the Dog

Shrillblog: Ex Bush Ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz Is Shrill!

According to Herskowitz... Bush and his advisers were sold on the idea that it was difficult for a president to accomplish an electoral agenda without the record-high approval numbers that accompany successful if modest wars. The revelations on Bush’s attitude toward Iraq emerged recently during two taped interviews of Herskowitz, which included a discussion of a variety of matters, including his continued closeness with the Bush family, indicated by his subsequent selection to pen an authorized biography of Bush’s grandfather, written and published last year with the assistance and blessing of the Bush family. Herskowitz also revealed the following: -In 2003, Bush’s father indicated to him that he disagreed with his son’s invasion of Iraq. -Bush admitted that he failed to fulfill his Vietnam-era domestic National Guard service obligation, but claimed that he had been “excused.”... -Bush described his own business ventures as “floundering” before campaign officials insisted on recasting them in a positive light....

According to Herskowitz, George W. Bush’s beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House – ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. “Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade.”

Bush’s circle of pre-election advisers had a fixation on the political capital that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher collected from the Falklands War. Said Herskowitz: “They were just absolutely blown away, just enthralled by the scenes of the troops coming back, of the boats, people throwing flowers at [Thatcher] and her getting these standing ovations in Parliament and making these magnificent speeches.”...

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There's more. Follow the link. If he'd stopped with Afghanistan, and done that properly, he'd be ahead by a mile now.

With great anguish and pained reluctance, The Economist endorses John Kerry for President

Economist.com | America's next president

This won't much difference to the electorate. The readers of The Economist are not likely to be undecided. It will, however, sting deeply at the White House. Are they sure the WSJ will really endorse Bush?

Some background. The Economist is probably the most influential periodical in the world, with the WSJ and NYT a close second. It's said to be the only periodical Bill Gates reads. It's historically been Liberal -- as in 19th century secular humanist Liberal -- with a strong libertarian bent.

Over the past 10 years the US circulation has grown sharply and the influence of the GOP has also risen. I've long suspected they were getting too many WSJ alumni.

Over this time they abandoned much of their historic legacy and began to track republican doctrine. Their attacks on Clinton has an amazing component of right wing moralizing -- in no way libertarian or liberal. Their endorsement of Bush was amazingly vacuous, and their editorial pages have sought every excuse to support him.

Meanwhile, in the back pages, a rebellion has simmered. A recent very positive review of Seymour Hersh's book is a case in point.

So this is a revolution. They'll lose a LOT of readers with this one, but keep others. Some excerpts from a fairly backhanded, agonizingly reluctant endorsement. At least they avoided the coward's choice of endorsing no-one.

The incompetent or the incoherent?
Oct 28th 2004

With a heavy heart, we think American readers should vote for John Kerry on November 2nd.

YOU might have thought that, three years after a devastating terrorist attack on American soil, a period which has featured two wars, radical political and economic legislation, and an adjustment to one of the biggest stockmarket crashes in history, the campaign for the presidency would be an especially elevated and notable affair. If so, you would be wrong. This year's battle has been between two deeply flawed men: George Bush, who has been a radical, transforming president but who has never seemed truly up to the job, let alone his own ambitions for it; and John Kerry, who often seems to have made up his mind conclusively about something only once, and that was 30 years ago. But on November 2nd, Americans must make their choice, as must The Economist. It is far from an easy call, especially against the backdrop of a turbulent, dangerous world. But, on balance, our instinct is towards change rather than continuity: Mr Kerry, not Mr Bush.

Whenever we express a view of that sort, some readers are bound to protest that we, as a publication based in London, should not be poking our noses in other people's politics. Translated, this invariably means that protesters disagree with our choice. It may also, however, reflect a lack of awareness about our readership. The Economist's weekly sales in the United States are about 450,000 copies, which is three times our British sale and roughly 45% of our worldwide total. All those American readers will now be pondering how to vote, or indeed whether to. Thus, as at every presidential election since 1980, we hope it may be useful for us to say how we would think about our vote if we had one.

The case against George Bush

That decision cannot be separated from the terrible memory of September 11th, nor can it fail to begin as an evaluation of the way in which Mr Bush and his administration responded to that day. For Mr Bush's record during the past three years has been both inspiring and disturbing.

Mr Bush was inspiring in the way he reacted to the new world in which he, and America, found itself. He grasped the magnitude of the challenge well. His military response in Afghanistan was not the sort of poorly directed lashing out that Bill Clinton had used in 1998 after al-Qaeda destroyed two American embassies in east Africa: it was a resolute, measured effort, which was reassuringly sober about the likely length of the campaign against Osama bin Laden and the elusiveness of anything worth the name of victory. Mistakes were made, notably when at Tora Bora Mr bin Laden and other leaders probably escaped, and when following the war both America and its allies devoted insufficient military and financial resources to helping Afghanistan rebuild itself. But overall, the mission has achieved a lot: the Taliban were removed, al-Qaeda lost its training camps and its base, and Afghanistan has just held elections that bring cautious hope for the central government's future ability to bring stability and prosperity.

The biggest mistake, though, was one that will haunt America for years to come. It lay in dealing with prisoners-of-war by sending hundreds of them to the American base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, putting them in a legal limbo, outside the Geneva conventions and outside America's own legal system. That act reflected a genuinely difficult problem: that of having captured people of unknown status but many of whom probably did want to kill Americans, at a time when to set them free would have been politically controversial, to say the least. That difficulty cannot neutralise the damage caused by this decision, however. Today, Guantánamo Bay offers constant evidence of America's hypocrisy, evidence that is disturbing for those who sympathise with it, cause-affirming for those who hate it. This administration, which claims to be fighting for justice, the rule of law and liberty, is incarcerating hundreds of people, whether innocent or guilty, without trial or access to legal representation. The White House's proposed remedy, namely military tribunals, merely compounds the problem.

When Mr Bush decided to frame his foreign policy in the sort of language and objectives previously associated with Woodrow Wilson, John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, he was bound to be greeted with cynicism. Yet he was right to do so. To paraphrase a formula invented by his ally, Tony Blair, Mr Bush was promising to be "tough on terrorism, tough on the causes of terrorism", and the latter he attributed to the lack of democracy, human rights and opportunity in much of the world, especially the Arab countries. To call for an effort to change that lamentable state of affairs was inspiring and surely correct. The credibility of the call was enhanced by this month's Afghan election, and may in future be enhanced by successful and free elections in Iraq. But that remains ahead, and meanwhile Mr Bush's credibility has been considerably undermined not just by Guantánamo but also by two big things: by the sheer incompetence and hubristic thinking evident in the way in which his team set about the rebuilding of Iraq, once Saddam Hussein's regime had been toppled; and by the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which strengthened the suspicion that the mistreatment or even torture of prisoners was being condoned.

Invading Iraq was not a mistake. Although the intelligence about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction has been shown to have been flimsy and, with hindsight, wrong, Saddam's record of deception in the 12 years since the first Gulf war meant that it was right not to give him the benefit of the doubt. The containment scheme deployed around him was unsustainable and politically damaging: military bases in holy Saudi Arabia, sanctions that impoverished and even killed Iraqis and would have collapsed. But changing the regime so incompetently was a huge mistake. By having far too few soldiers to provide security and by failing to pay Saddam's remnant army, a task that was always going to be long and hard has been made much, much harder. Such incompetence is no mere detail: thousands of Iraqis have died as a result and hundreds of American soldiers. The eventual success of the mission, while still possible, has been put in unnecessary jeopardy. So has America's reputation in the Islamic world, both for effectiveness and for moral probity.

If Mr Bush had meanwhile been making progress elsewhere in the Middle East, such mistakes might have been neutralised. But he hasn't. Israel and Palestine remain in their bitter conflict, with America readily accusable of bias. In Iran the conservatives have become stronger and the country has moved closer to making nuclear weapons. Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia have not turned hostile, but neither have they been terribly supportive nor reform-minded. Libya's renunciation of WMD is the sole clear piece of progress.

This only makes the longer-term project more important, not less. To succeed, however, America needs a president capable of admitting to mistakes and of learning from them. Mr Bush has steadfastly refused to admit to anything: even after Abu Ghraib, when he had a perfect opportunity to dismiss Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, and declare a new start, he chose not to. Instead, he treated the abuses as if they were a low-level, disciplinary issue. Can he learn from mistakes? The current approach in Iraq, of training Iraqi security forces and preparing for elections to establish an Iraqi government with popular support, certainly represents an improvement, although America still has too few troops. And no one knows, for example, whether Mr Rumsfeld will stay in his job, or go. In the end, one can do no more than guess about whether in a second term Mr Bush would prove more competent...

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They go on to slander Kerry to cover themselves. I agree with much of their critique of Bush, but they're only scraping the surface. They know better, but probably feel they've risked enough.

They will pay dearly for this endorsement, but, in the ultimate test, they have redeemed themselves.

A completely unverified soldier's tale -- as related to an airline passenger

The Washington Note Archives

Excerpts here, emphases mine. Read the whole story at source.

I JUST SAT NEXT TO A VERY TOUGH SOLDIER FROM THE 82ND AIRBORNE on a flight back from Europe. I have been thinking for two days about how to share some of the things he told me without compromising him.

This guy I met is not one prone to talk; he was very serious, very mellow -- and comes from a family of enlisted military men. His dad was in Vietnam.

He has had one rotation in Afghanistan, one in Iraq. He is now in Germany but will soon be transfered back to Iraq. He was at Tora Bora and has seen a lot of Iraq, Afghan, and American dead....

...I asked him what he thought happened at Abu Ghraib and the handling of prisoners in general. He blamed both the people in the prison and their superiors. He says that everyone knows that the adrenaline rush and completely new experiences these young Americans are having lead to scary behaviors. He also stated that it is well known among the troops that al Qaeda takes (or keeps) no prisoners.

Early in the Afghanistan incursion, he said that he was on one of the last helicopters out of a very scary incident in which about ten U.S. soldiers were killed in a well-planned diversion and ambush by al Qaeda and the Taliban. He was at a fueling station between Kandahar and Shkin, very close to the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. A group began firing on U.S. soldiers at the fueling station, and some choppers and soldiers went after them. From behind, from the mountains on the Pakistani side, a massive number of al Qaeda and Taliban forces were streaming down behind the Americans -- and the soldier I was talking to could see this from the air in the chopper he was in.

Black Hawks were called in -- and the Taliban took out one or two -- but basically everyone just retreated. According to him at least ten soldiers surrendered to al Qaeda, and they were found later. One of the soldiers had had his penis castrated, and then this was stuffed in his mouth (sorry for the graphic detail, but it's important). The other soldiers were all shot in the head. Several others were "cut up," he said. To him, it was clear that they had been tortured.

He said that these experiences have been repeated in other encounters with al Qaeda -- and thus many of the soldiers who feel on the front lines of a war they don't understand and can't figure out -- have them so incredibly on edge that it's not surprising that they could come undone in a prisoner-holding situation. What he said though is that all of the officers know this to be the case and probably expected this kind of behavior from the soldiers and MPs.

He said that at night, when they are moving people or supplies, or making deliveries, they are scared -- and drive at 80 or 90 miles an hour with their lights off. He said lots of innocent people are killed by this night-driving and while the troops are supposed to report any damage or harm they do, almost none do -- no one wants to stop. This confirms an anecdote about the same kind of killer-driving that Seymour Hersh recently shared with me.

Interestingly, he said that all enlisted men or officers in command positions have orders not to talk about their war experiences with the junior and fresh troops. He refuses -- and tells those people under him everything he knows because he thinks it will help save their lives. When he went to Afghanistan at the beginning, basically nothing was told to them; he kept repeating "nothing." And he said that their basic training in North Carolina was 180 degrees opposite of what they really needed to know for this kind of combat.

He said morale is very low among the troops and that they all want out -- few believe in the war or Bush, and he thinks that many of these troops' negative feelings are being transmitted back to extended family networks that have traditionally been supporters of the Republican Party, like his own family.

He shared quite a bit more, including that his military commanders are planning for at minimum an eight year deployment in Iraq, maybe longer. He also shared an interesting anecdoted that about a year ago, certain commanders in the 82nd Airborne had been told to prepare for a quick incursion into Cuba. I was stunned.

He said, "Yep, we couldn't believe that on top of everything else, Bush thought he could go take out Castro." The Navy Seals were going to go in and do the dirty work, he said, and the "82nd was going to go in for clean-up." He said that he never heard more about it but that the orders clearly didn't go forward -- but they were prepared for that possibility and told that "Bush just wanted to take out Castro."

Another thing he shared was that after this incident at Shkin, mentioned above, the Navy Seals were sent in to go find the al Qaeda and Taliban troops hiding in the Pakistan mountains. He said that they were all through those mountains in Pakistan and what he told me was probably classified. But they found nothing, packed their bags, and went home.

... He said that in contrast to Vietnam where U.S. soldiers were killing other U.S. soldiers and officers whom they didn't like -- that is not happening in Afghanistan or Iraq. But he said people are getting depressed and disillusioned. They don't know what their objectives are -- and they see lots of dead children, dead innocent men and women, grieving families, whose early appreciation for Americans has given away to profound hate and resentment.

He said that if he were one of the Iraqi citizens experiencing what an occupying force was doing, he'd be fighting too. He said that the only way to win is to get out of there -- let the Iraqis resolve the issues they need to resolve internally. Give them money, give them resources, give them advice if asked -- but get the U.S. troops out.

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This is completely unverified, but it contains absolutely no surprises -- except the oddball Cuba scenario (exception: the alleged treatment of captured US soldiers has not been widely reported -- however it is consistent with al Qaeda ideology and behavior). It puts into one personal scenario what's been reported and verified elsewhere.

It's noteworthy that US soldiers are holding up pretty well under incredible burdens -- fragging is not yet occurring and massacres of non-combatants does not appear to be common. However these are early days in a projected 8 year occupation.

Cut, run and contain may be among the least bad of a terrible set of alternatives. If this were a just world Rumsfeld and Bush would be drafted into the infantry. Perhaps Bush might complete his missing term in the National Guard?

George Bush, American Calvinist. It's as bad as Susskind said.

The New York Times > Opinion > ROBERT WRIGHT: Faith, Hope and Clarity

Robert Wright is a visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values and the author of "Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny." He wrote this piece for the NYT. It adds new details to Susskind's famed NYT Magazine article on 'The Power of the Will' -- Bush's faith-and-will based approach to altering reality. By Bush's own words he's a devotee of Oswald Chambers.

Bush is the American Calvinist, and the world is trapped in his beliefs -- and delusions. Emphases mine.

October 28, 2004

... there is a way to get a clearer picture of religion's role in this White House. Every morning President Bush reads a devotional from "My Utmost for His Highest," a collection of homilies by a Protestant minister named Oswald Chambers, who lived a century ago. As Mr. Bush explained in an interview broadcast on Tuesday on Fox News, reading Chambers is a way for him "on a daily basis to be in the Word."

Chambers's book continues to sell well, especially an updated edition with the language tweaked toward the modern. Inspecting the book - or the free online edition - may give even some devout Christians qualms about America's current guidance.

... the theme that dominates "My Utmost": committing your life to Jesus Christ - "absolute and irrevocable surrender of the will" - and staying committed. "If we turn away from obedience for even one second, darkness and death are immediately at work again." In all things and at all times, you must do God's will.

But what exactly does God want? Chambers gives little substantive advice. There is no great stress on Jesus' ethical teaching - not much about loving your neighbor or loving your enemy. (And Chambers doesn't seem to share Isaiah's hope of beating swords into plowshares. "Life without war is impossible in the natural or the supernatural realm.") But the basic idea is that, once you surrender to God, divine guidance is palpable. "If you obey God in the first thing he shows you, then he instantly opens up the next truth to you," Chambers writes.

And you shouldn't let your powers of reflection get in the way. Chambers lauds Abraham for preparing to slay his son at God's command without, as the Bible put it, conferring "with flesh and blood." Chambers warns: "Beware when you want to 'confer with flesh and blood' or even your own thoughts, insights, or understandings - anything that is not based on your personal relationship with God. These are all things that compete with and hinder obedience to God."

Once you're on the right path, setbacks that might give others pause needn't phase you. As Chambers noted in last Sunday's reading, "Paul said, in essence, 'I am in the procession of a conqueror, and it doesn't matter what the difficulties are, for I am always led in triumph.' " Indeed, setbacks may have a purpose, Chambers will tell Mr. Bush this Sunday: "God frequently has to knock the bottom out of your experience as his saint to get you in direct contact with himself." Faith "by its very nature must be tested and tried."

Some have marveled at Mr. Bush's refusal to admit any mistakes in Iraq other than "catastrophic success." But what looks like negative feedback to some of us - more than 1,100 dead Americans, more than 10,000 dead Iraqi civilians and the biggest incubator of anti-American terrorists in history - is, through Chambers's eyes, not cause for doubt. Indeed, seemingly negative feedback may be positive feedback, proof that God is there, testing your faith, strengthening your resolve.

This, I think, is Mr. Bush's optimism: In the longest run, divinely guided decisions will be vindicated, and any gathering mountains of evidence to the contrary may themselves be signs of God's continuing involvement. It's all good.

... Chambers himself eventually showed some philosophical flexibility. By and large, the teachings in "My Utmost for His Highest" were written before World War I (and compiled by his wife posthumously). But the war seems to have made him less sanguine about the antagonism that, he had long stressed, is inherent in life.

Shortly before his death in 1917, Chambers declared that "war is the most damnably bad thing," according to Christianity Today magazine. He added: "If the war has made me reconcile myself with the fact that there is sin in human beings, I shall no longer go with my head in the clouds, or buried in the sand like an ostrich, but I shall be wishing to face facts as they are.

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If only Bush would move on to read the later Chambers, post WW I. Or if only Bush were a preacher or writer rather than President.

There are good reasons to vote for GWB. If you believe preventing abortion is the overwhelmingly important thing in the world, worth sacrificing thousands of adults and children to the pyre of war and chaos, then vote for GWB. If you believe he has been appointed by your deity to rule, then vote for GWB. If you seek the end of human civilization (radical green? millenialist), then vote for GWB.

I can't think of any other reasons.

Abu Ghraib -- lies and more lies

The New York Times > Opinion > Editoral: Abu Ghraib, Unresolved

When the Abu Ghraib prison scandal first broke, the Bush administration struck a pose of righteous indignation. It assured the world that the problem was limited to one block of one prison, that the United States would never condone the atrocities we saw in those terrible photos, that it would punish those responsible for any abuse - regardless of their rank - and that it was committed to defending the Geneva Conventions and the rights of prisoners.

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We know now what we suspected then, all of the post-Abu Ghraib statements by the Bush administration were lies. The editorial goes on to refute each point, without using the L word.

Some Americans consider Abu Ghraib just fine with them. They favor more extensive torture and humiliation of the enemy. Most have put it out of memory.

As for me, it is a terrible thing by itself, but even worse as a sign of what else this administration has done and will do. The evidence suggests it is only a small part of a grim picture.

From a purely pragmatic perspective, it has alienated our historic allies far more than most Americans realize. If Bush is reelected, foreigners will (justly) conclude that Americans approve of Abu Grhaib. They will behave accordingly. Putin will be comforted, Europe will seek its own defense.

A military theorist despairs at the conduct of the war on terror

William Gibson

I read a later posting of this guy's. He's a rock-ribbed (ok, antediluvian) cultural conservative. I can't imagine him voting for Kerry. On the other hand, he sure thinks our Iraq war is pretty darned stupid.

Red Sox win, 'Hobbit' joins human family tree

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | 'Hobbit' joins human family tree

But Henry Gee, senior editor at Nature magazine, goes further. He speculates that species like H.floresiensis might still exist, somewhere in the unexplored tropical forest of Indonesia.

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This is what happens when the Quantum gates open. The Red Sox win, and we discover a diminutive human species that probably survived at least up to 12,000 years ago -- when a volcanic eruption destroyed the peculiar fauna of an Indonesian island. Ok, maybe survived up to 300 years ago. What the heck, maybe they're still out there. Probably playing dice with neanderthals, using bones from homo erectus.

This might give religious fundamentalists a wee bit of heartburn.

I need to go to bed now. I think I'm hallucinating.

The quantum gates have opened. Kerry can win.

BBC SPORT | Other Sport | US Sport | Boston win World Series title

The old world has passed. A new era dawns. All that was once impossible is possible.

Role playing games and robotic simulants -- the future of games and the evolution of mind

Fantasy Economics - Why economists are obsessed with online role-playing games. By Robert Shapiro

I was discussing this topic with a colleague today. He mentioned how one company used "sweatshop" low wage Mexican game players to outsource the tedious work of building initial assets in many role playing games.

That led me to the next logical step -- robotic players. I was inspired by an old science fiction satire about a world in which the costs of production had fallen so far that consumption became a duty rather than a privilege. Only the rich could afford to live without constantly consuming goods. The protagonist breaks the viscious cycle by building robots to consume things. Ok, so it's not the same thing at all -- but that's how my brain works.

I don't mean simulated players within the game -- the game wouldn't allow that. No, simulated players outside the game. They don't have to strike keys, but they need to generate keystroke and mouse motion signals. They don't have to read the screen, but they need to be able to "interpret" the digital stream representing onscreen objects.

Observed within a game the avatar for such a simulated player might seem clumsy ... even a bit "mindless'. Or they might seem oddly smooth but "stupid". They would, however, react with lightning speed to certain stimuli. They could kill game-rabits and the like very well. They'd never advance far in the game, but they could earn a lot of low level script.

And there could be a lot of them. Thousands. Millions.

Just like robots in the real world. Or just like frogs.

Of course the game masters might come up with tricks to detect robots. mini-Turing tests that would a robot would fail. So the robots would get smarter. One human might manage a hundred robots, constantly on call to solve Turing tests the robots could identify but not resolve. The robots might be supplemented by rats responding to a rat-VR version of the game. Eventually rat tissue plated out in growth chambers would play a role.

And so it goes.

Eventually the robots/simulants become a part of the game. Other simulants compete with them. Some get their own tv shows.

And do it goes.

President Cheney: Reason enough to vote for Kerrey

The Washington Monthly....Cheney was a wee bit unhappy with their conclusions:

The CTC concluded that Saddam Hussein had not materially supported Zarqawi before the U.S.-led invasion and that Zarqawi's infrastructure in Iraq before the war was confined to the northern no-fly zones of Kurdistan, beyond Baghdad's reach. Cheney reacted with fury, screaming at the briefer that CIA was trying to get John Kerry elected by contradicting the president's stance that Saddam had supported terrorism and therefore needed to be overthrown. The hapless briefer was shaken by the vice president's outburst, and the incident was reported back to [newly appointed CIA director Porter] Goss, who indicated that he was reluctant to confront the vice president's staff regarding it.

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Cheney is a raving lunatic. One heartbeat from the presidency. No wonder The Onion's Cheney parody was so persuasive -- it's easy to see him terrorising the nation.

myBallot.net: online ballot representation from Minnesota e-democracy

voter info from MyBallot.net

Very impressive! Creates a simulated ballot based on address information. Candidates with web sites get a link to the site. This year it's very simple -- except for the mysterious soil and water commissioners. These seats are contested and I know nothing about them. These should not be elected positions. (Neither should the judges for that matter.)

TIME.com: The Hunt for Osama bin Laden - November 2001

TIME.com: The Hunt for Osama bin Laden

I came across this reference in some old email of mine. Interesting to read it in light of what we know now. Rumsfeld's "trap" was not so well set as the journalist then imagined. I don't think they expected bin Laden to last past December 2001. (BTW, I'm inclined to think he's now dead, or, rather less likely, captured. Unfortunately, Zawahiri is likely neither.)

GOP Dirty Tricks in Ohio and Florida

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | New Florida vote scandal feared

Very dirty tricks. Tricks developed over generations of american apartheid. Now in the service of George Bush.

In this case the email went awry because it was sent to a .org rather than .com address. The .com address is the Bush campaign address, the .org is a democratic activist's domain.

Iraq is a festering pile of advanced explosive devices

Salon.com News | Tip of the iceberg

As I would later learn, the 120th had, for all intents and purposes, become the caretaker of Saddam Hussein's grotesque legacy in western Iraq: a vast, murky labyrinth of bunkers, tunnels and sandpits that contain a staggering menagerie of exotic bombs, bullets, shells, mines, missiles and torpedoes. All told, there are 103 known sites in the 120th's sector, encompassing approximately 100,000 of the estimated 600,000 tons of high-density explosives strewn across Iraq.

...To visit a captured weapons site the likes of which I saw at Taqaddum is to witness the byproducts of unfathomable delusion and malfeasance and to parse the chilling dreams of a lost regime with an unquenchable desire for ever-larger and more grandiose weaponry and death-dealing machinery. Surveying the kaleidoscope of munitions at Taqaddum, I could discern no real rhyme or reason to it at all. There were scores of 6,000-pound anti-ship bombs of Chinese manufacture, for which the Iraqis never possessed aircraft capable of lifting. Strewn throughout the maze of bunkers and sandpits were hundreds of bombs of South African, Chilean, Soviet, West German, Yugoslav, Czech and U.S. origin, almost all of them sitting on wooden pallets, left to the mercy of the elements and the wild dogs that haunt the place.

Much of this ammunition was decades old. Many of the bullets and bombs found at Taqaddum corresponded to weapon systems that have been obsolete for decades. It was as if someone had given their crazy uncle $10 billion and said, "Buy whatever you want, so long as it explodes." The tour guide for this potpourri of death, Capt. Bruner, mentioned that the Russians had probably been dumping untold amounts of obsolete ordnance on the Iraqis for years, exploiting Saddam's compulsive desire for power to obtain cold, hard cash.

...Regarding the general situation of unaccounted-for explosives, physicist and weapons expert Ivan Oelrich, a former consultant for the U.S. Army and now with the Federation of American Scientists, put it this way: "I'll bet if you took all the car bombs that have gone off in Iraq in the past six months and tallied them, [they] would add up to a couple of tons of high explosives. So if they're doing what they're doing with two or three tons, what difference does it make if they have 380 more?"

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The Bush administration has a tragi-comic problem with the recent story of ungarded explosives. The real response to the accusations of negligence is to put it in perspective -- it's only a small part of an overall problem that's far worse. Not the answer Rove likes to give.

The editorial endorsements -- enough to shift the tide?

Shrillblog: The Kennebec Journal of Augusta, Maine Is Shrill And Unbalanced

The intensity and distribution of newspaper endorsement of John Kerry has surprised me. I was not expecting this level of ferocity. Even the Financial Times has spoken out (The Economist appears to be cowering in the corner -- terrified of losing 1/2 their readership and 3/4 of their UK staff).

Might this be enough to offset neo-fascist GOP motions in Ohio?

The GOP is not the Nazi party ...

Shrillblog: Wow. Diana Moon Is Actually Too Shrill

... As potentially unpleasant as this Ohio business is, it is a democratic paradise in comparison to 1930's Germany - and to 1930's America, for that matter. And despite some rather facile analogies of manner one could make - totalitarian tendencies here and there; an upsetting predisposition to blind hero-worship of Bush in certain circles; and the fact that, were it not for unfortunate historical echoes, a decent 4-word slogan for the Bush re-election campaign would be "triumph of the will" - there is no reasonable analogy of scale between the modern-day Republican Party and the Nazis. The modern Republican Party leadership is much, much, much better than the Nazis, probably better than Vladimir Putin, and not too much worse than the Republican Party of Nixon and McCarthy 50 years ago. It is important to remember that in 2 short weeks these people are going to voted out of office, soon to be but a memory, and it will be much easier for everyone moving forward if we don't have intemperate charges of Nazism on our consciences.

But this is not the real problem; the real problem is this: shrilly comparing republicans to Nazis is not only too shrill - it is also, paradoxically, not shrill enough. It is, in fact, but a pale shadow of true shrillness, which can only come from contemplation of the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence and simple disconnection from reality of the Bush administration. Looking for Nazi parallels blinds us to the fact that the Bush administration is made up of dishonest, incapable, easily-duped buffoonish ideologues, and takes up free time that could be more usefully spent ululating mindlessly to the dead, uncaring stars...

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The good news is we've only slipped back towards the darker parts of American history, not German history. The bad news is that the dangers ahead may exceed those of 1939 -- if only because modern weapons of mass mayhem dwarf those of 70 years past.

Ralph Nader supports vote swapping - a way out?

VotePair News: Ralph Nader Points Swing State Supporters to VP

Ralph Nader on a C-Span mentioned that swing state supporters should check out VotePair.org. The following documents where during the broadcast VotePair is mentioned...

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Has Nader identified a way out of the conundrum? With the election perched on the finest edge of a razor, and minor details like human civilization at risk, has he taken -- at the last moment -- the higher road? If I were a Texas democrat, I'd trade my presidential vote to a Nader supporter.

Should Rove be scared?

PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column

Anna Greenberg of pollster Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research told the BBC, or example, that only three percent of Americans use their mobile phones as a sole communication device, but the FCC said two years ago that five percent of U.S. homes have only mobile phone service and that 15 percent of university students have only mobile phone service. And with 77 million U.S. mobile phones owned by people age 18-24, many of those supposedly counted are probably still associated with a parent's hard-wired telephone number but are really mobile. So the numbers of unpolled votes could be huge.

And though pollsters (who after all are generally in business to do this work) deny it, the switch from fixed to mobile communication is already having an impact on the outcome of elections.

In the last presidential election, one might have expected the final tracking polls to pretty closely reflect the actual outcome of the election only a few hours later. But no. Gore was generally two to three points down in most tracking polls conducted on November 6, 2000, but won the popular vote on November 7 by about half a million voters, or half of one percent. True, this is within the statistical range of most polls, but if the deviation from the actual vote count was truly random noise, then half of the tracking polls would have counted high and half counted low. But that's not the way it happened, and the reason isn't noise, but a consistent sampling error.

More recently in the 2003, Philadelphia mayoral election the final tracking polls gave incumbent mayor John Street a slight statistical lead over challenger Sam Katz, yet the actual vote went 59 to 41 for Street. How could those Philadelphia tracking polls be so far off? They missed the extensive effort to register student voters in that city, with its several major universities.

Now how about Diddy and all the others urging young people to register and vote in the upcoming Presidential election? Their stated goal is 20 million new voters (out of a total of perhaps 110-120 million voters) and given the fervent message and extensive advertising on MTV, VH1 and elsewhere, that goal just might be reached, presumably with most of those kids voting for Kerry, the Democratic challenger. If the polls are skewed, then Kerry is actually doing much better and can probably expect a comfortable win.

But if that's the case, why aren't we hearing about it?

The likely answer is simply because Democratic strategists fear any sign of cockiness will result in many of those newly registered young voters not bothering to vote at all, leading to a Bush victory. So nobody says anything, holding their breath and hoping for a particular outcome.

And Diddy, I hear he's planning to sublet the Lincoln bedroom.

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I'll be out there November 2nd, on the phones and in the car. As for Rove, he's going to do something desperate.

Escape from Tora Bora: how bin Laden got away

How bin Laden got away | csmonitor.com

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Not quite the story Bush wants us to believe. Fascinating details!

Bush charity? Maybe. Or was it mandated community service?

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

President Bush often has cited his work in 1973 with a now-defunct inner-city program for troubled teens as the source for his belief in 'compassionate conservatism.' 'I realized then that a society can change and must change one person at a time ...' Bush said in a video shown at the 2000 Republican National Convention about his tenure at P.U.L.L.... 'I was working full time for an inner-city poverty program known as Project P.U.L.L.,' Bush said in his 1999 autobiography, 'A Charge to Keep.' 'My friend John White ... asked me to come help him run the program. ... I was intrigued by John's offer. ... Now I had a chance to help people.

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The program may have inspired Bush, but it appears he was not there voluntarily. It appears to have been some sort of mandated community service. Given his admitted alcoholism it was probably related to a DWI charge -- a drug charge is also a possibility.

The secret government

The New York Times > International > International Special > After Terror, a Secret Rewriting of Military Law

In early November 2001, with Americans still staggered by the Sept. 11 attacks, a small group of White House officials worked in great secrecy to devise a new system of justice for the new war they had declared on terrorism.

Determined to deal aggressively with the terrorists they expected to capture, the officials bypassed the federal courts and their constitutional guarantees, giving the military the authority to detain foreign suspects indefinitely and prosecute them in tribunals not used since World War II.

The plan was considered so sensitive that senior White House officials kept its final details hidden from the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and the secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, officials said. It was so urgent, some of those involved said, that they hardly thought of consulting Congress.

White House officials said their use of extraordinary powers would allow the Pentagon to collect crucial intelligence and mete out swift, unmerciful justice. 'We think it guarantees that we'll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve,' said Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a driving force behind the policy.

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The "kind of treatment". Yes. An eye for an eye.

So Cheney wrote this. I wonder if Bush even understood what it was. No doubt Feith was involved, and Cheney's dark inner circle. I wonder if this was why Karen Hughes left.

Powell and Rice were not informed.

Why does Powell not resign?

WolfpacksforTruth.org: The Real Story on George Bush's "Wolves" Commercial

WolfpacksforTruth.org: The Real Story on George Bush's "Wolves" Commercial

The wolves speak up. They were conned. They support Kerry.

Sometimes humor is the only possible response.

Shrillblog: Conservative Daniel Drezner Is Shrill

Shrillblog: Conservative Daniel Drezner Is Shrill

A quite funny (in a dark and dire way) before and after blog posting. in 2002 Drezner mocks Al Gore's speech on Iraq, in 2004 Drezner is a raving lunatic anti-Bushie who makes 2002 Gore look like a friend of the Bush administration.

Shatner bids for seat on Virgin sub-orbiter

Slashdot | Shatner Aims for Real 'Star Trek'

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Remember the PanAm orbiter in 2001? Maybe we'll have a "Virgin" sub-orbiter in 2011. Shatner's not a young man, but I hope he gets a seat. Branson could sell every seat on the first flight as a promo for a Star Trek movie and easily cover the seat charges ($210K/seat).

The first ship is to be called the "VSS Enterprise" in the "Virgin Galactic" fleet.

Hey, sometimes dreams are worthwhile.

Osama's Islamism and Saddam's Baathism are somewhat alike

Osama's Islamism and Saddam's Baathism are somewhat alike

Just as our government has ill-served the American people by habitually failing to explain its reasoning, then it is all the more important that journalists and intellectuals build constructively on each other's work to articulate and understand difficult and complex ideas. Regardless of the historical connections between Islamism and Arab nationalism, it's possible to make a very good argument against the administration's conduct of the war on terror—but it's hard to see the virtue of making one based on a faulty understanding.

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Factual, insightful, persuasive. If only we had a leadership that was able to think rationally.

Cognitive Dissonance and the electorate

KRT Wire | 10/21/2004 | Poll finds reality gap among Bush supporters

There may be another reason, Kull said. Asked whether U.S. forces should have invaded Iraq if U.S. intelligence had concluded that Iraq was not making WMD or providing support to al-Qaeda, 58 percent of Bush supporters said no.

"To support the president and to accept that he took the United States to war based on mistaken assumptions is difficult to bear, especially in light of the continuing costs in terms of lives and money," Kull said.

"Apparently, to avoid this cognitive dissonance, Bush supporters suppress awareness of unsettling information...

... The survey also found that Bush supporters have "numerous misperceptions" about the president's positions. Majorities incorrectly believe that Bush backs the Kyoto global-warming treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the International Criminal Court, and the treaty banning land mines.

A majority of Bush backers (57 percent) also believe most people in the world favor Bush's re-election, contrary to the findings of several polls.

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This is a variant on the 92% number -- the percentage of Americans who feel terrorism is our number one problem who support George Bush.

Bush supporters oddly enough have many of the same preferences as non-supporters. They favor various treaties, want to protect the environment, want to deal with global warming, don't want to go to war without sound reasons, etc. The problem is, they think Bush supports their positions. They even think the rest of the western world suporters George Bush!

In other words, the electorate is a bit balmy. Was it always this way? I can't imagine a point in my lifetime when so many people were so disconnected from fact. These aren't matters of opinion -- Bush vetoed the treaties his supporters think he favored!

The article ends with the sort of peurile pseudo-balanced comment that's common in modern journalism. I won't bother quoting it, but we do need to rewire journalism schools.

There are days when I think Ayn Rand might be have been right after all.

Bush: they hate us for our freedoms

Afghanistan, Iraq: Two Wars Collide (washingtonpost.com)

Most officials interviewed said Bush has not devised an answer to a problem then-CIA Director George J. Tenet identified publicly on Feb. 11, 2003 -- "the numbers of societies and peoples excluded from the benefits of an expanding global economy, where the daily lot is hunger, disease, and displacement -- and that produce large populations of disaffected youth who are prime recruits for our extremist foes."

The president and his most influential advisers, many officials said, do not see those factors -- or U.S. policy overseas -- as primary contributors to the terrorism threat. Bush's explanation, in private and public, is that terrorists hate America for its freedom.

Sageman, who supports some of Bush's approach, said that analysis is "nonsense, complete nonsense. They obviously haven't looked at any surveys." The central findings of polling by the Pew Charitable Trust and others, he said, is that large majorities in much of the world "view us as a hypocritical huge beast throwing our weight around in the Middle East."

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Interesting that Tenet does focus on what's important. I cannot fathom Bush, is he mad?

Open Source Jihad

Afghanistan, Iraq: Two Wars Collide (washingtonpost.com)

Marc Sageman, a psychologist and former CIA case officer who studies the formation of jihadist cells, said the inspirational power of the Sept. 11 attacks -- and rage in the Islamic world against U.S. steps taken since -- has created a new phenomenon. Groups of young men gather in common outrage, he said, and a violent plan takes form without the need for an outside leader to identify, persuade or train those who carry it out.

The brutal challenge for U.S. intelligence, Sageman said, is that "you don't know who's going to be a terrorist" anymore. Citing the 15 men who killed 190 passengers on March 11 in synchronized bombings of the Spanish rail system, he said "if you had gone to those guys in Madrid six months prior, they'd say 'We're not terrorists,' and they weren't. Madrid took like five weeks from inception."

Much the same pattern, officials said, preceded deadly attacks in Indonesia, Turkey, Kenya, Morocco and elsewhere. There is no reason to believe, they said, that the phenomenon will remain overseas.

Such attacks do not rely on leaders as the Bush administration strategy has conceived them. New jihadists can acquire much of the know-how they need, Sageman and his counterparts still in government said, in al Qaeda's Saudi-published magazines, Al Baatar and the Voice of Jihad, available online.

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Microsoft's dominance and power created open source solutions. Natural selection, operating in the world of economics, produced an entity that monopolistic abuses could not eliminate.

In the much more brutal domain of state and non-state conflict, Bush's strategy created a new entity, call it open source jihad. Fueled by donations from Saudi Arabia and Syria, trained by widely distributed manuals, inspired by Al Jazeera, powered by nihilism, hatred, despair and xenophobia. Bush's response is to keep killing them until they are all gone.

And 92% of Americans consider this an effective strategy?

The opportunity cost of invading Iraq

Afghanistan, Iraq: Two Wars Collide (washingtonpost.com)

At the peak of the hunt for bin Laden and his lieutenants, in early 2002, about 150 commandos operated along Afghanistan's borders with Pakistan and Iran in a top-secret team known as Task Force 5. The task force included a few CIA paramilitaries, but most of its personnel came from military 'special mission units,' or SMUs, whose existence is not officially acknowledged. One is the Army squadron once known as Delta Force. The other -- specializing in human and technical intelligence operations -- has not been described before in public. Its capabilities include close-in electronic surveillance and, uniquely in the U.S. military, the conduct of 'low-level source operations' -- recruiting and managing spies.

These elite forces, along with the battlefield intelligence technology of Predator and Global Hawk drone aircraft, were the scarcest tools of the hunt for jihadists along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. With Bush's shift of focus to Iraq, the special mission units called most of their troops home to prepare for a new set of high-value targets in Baghdad.

'There is a direct consequence for us having taken these guys out prematurely,' said Leverett, who then worked as senior director for Middle Eastern affairs on Bush's NSC staff. 'There were people on the staff level raising questions about what that meant for getting al Qaeda, for creating an Afghan security and intelligence service [to help combat jihadists]. Those questions didn't get above staff level, because clearly there had been a strategic decision taken.'

Task Force 5 dropped in strength at times to as few as 30 men. Its counterpart in Iraq, by early 2003, burgeoned to more than 200 as an insurgency grew and Hussein proved difficult to find. Late last year, the Defense Department merged the two commando teams and headquartered the reflagged Task Force 121 under Rear Adm. William H. McRaven in Baghdad.

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An exceptional article in the Washington Post. Bush's 75% captured/killed statistic is bull feces.

Signs of the end-time

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog: My Name Is Frahnk-en-steen

Prosthetic hippocampus. Organic computation.

And so it goes.

The astonishing number: 92%

The Washington Monthly

92% of Americans for whom terrorism is their major concern plan to vote for George Bush

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I am stunned. I wonder if North Koreans, famed for their isolation and media control, are really any more ignorant of the world than we Americans.

The Herald-Palladium's scoop on the Tenet speech: demographics, HIV and CIA failures

The Herald-Palladium

This off-broadway Tenet speech can be spun many different ways. He doesn't address the extent to which the Bush administration bent the CIA to give them the answers they demanded. That's the ongoing question of interest. He does say the CIA failed, but that's only step one of the picture.

He does say some interesting things about demographics and HIV. Shades of the "yellow hordes". I wonder what he means by "maintain its [our] position". Emphases mine.

BTW, it's interesting to read spin-free coverage of a speech.

BENTON TOWNSHIP -- Although he emphasized that the Central Intelligence Agency boasts 'tremendously talented men and women,' former CIA Director George Tenet said it 'did not live up to our expectations as professionals' regarding the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the search for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

'We had inconsistent information, and we did not inform others in the community of gaps in our intelligence,' Tenet said. 'The extraordinary men and women who do magnificent work in the CIA are held accountable every day for what they do, and as part of keeping our faith with the American people, we will tell you when we're right or wrong.'

Tenet called the war on Iraq 'wrong' in a speech Wednesday night to 2,000 members of The Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan at Lake Michigan College's Mendel Center. He did not elaborate...

... He said the United States is 'winning the war on terror' due to the CIA's efforts to 'capture or kill' three-quarters of al-Qaida's leaders, pinpointed before 9/11. He expects to see Osama bin Ladin captured.

... 'Demographics and distribution trends are something we also need to keep an eye on,' Tenet said. 'The developed world is not reproducing at levels to maintain its position, while developing nations who cannot afford it, mostly Muslim ones, are exploding.'

Tenet said a developing nation's low per capita income, high unemployment among young men and high infant mortality rate strongly increase its likelihood of becoming a 'terrorist safe haven.'

'In 2010, 100 million people outside of Africa will be infected with HIV,' Tenet said. 'The secondary implications of this are staggering.'

James Oberg on NASA and errors

Murphy's Law and NASA

Space observers recall the NASA announcement in 1999 that one of its Mars probes had crashed into the planet because workers had mixed up metric and English units of measurement. The story was a real howler, and had elements of truth to it — but it was fundamentally a cover-up and a diversion.

It did turn out that engineers who built the Mars Climate Orbiter had provided a data table in "pound-force" rather than newtons, the metric measure of force (about equivalent to the downward weight of an apple in your hand). NASA flight controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., had used the faulty table for their navigation calculations during the long coast from Earth to Mars.

Upon arrival, the probe did not skim the upper atmosphere, as it had been aimed. Misled by the wrong numbers, guidance computers set it on a course that actually hit the atmosphere — where it burned up.

The easy answer — "blame the stupid contractors" — was actually a NASA public-relations gimmick to duck ultimate responsibility for the disaster. In order to promote the image of a faster-better-cheaper space program extolled by the Clinton administration, previously used checks and balances had been canceled. And reportedly, when space navigators intuitively developed a feeling that there was something wrong with the navigational database, they were told to hold the present course until they could prove something was wrong.

By then it was too late. The proper attitude should have been that in case of doubt, steer more safely, and take the corner at Mars farther out. NASA’s mismanagement, not a worker-bee foul-up, doomed that Mars probe...

...But with the Genesis accelerometers, apparently the approved design allowed either direction of installation. From the NASA report, it seems that the accelerometers had to be X-rayed to determine the internal up-down orientation of their sensors, which reportedly were described incorrectly in the technical drawings...

... In September 2003, a quarter-billion-dollar observation satellite was heavily damaged in a hangar when it moved without bolting it to its support frame. A review board recently attributed this to “lack of discipline in following procedures [and] complacent attitudes [and] poorly written or modified procedures.”

In 1998, a LockMart Titan 4 booster carrying a billion-dollar LockMart spy satellite exploded shortly after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Fla., due to frayed wiring that apparently had not been inspected. The following year, the expensive LockMart Milstar 4 satellite was placed into a useless orbit by a LockMart Titan/Centaur upper stage, because of erroneous calculations fed into the Centaur guidance system. (Explanation: “Engineers were traumatized by the Columbine shootings.")...

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Oberg attacks the "better, cheaper, faster" theme of his successor. Presumably he'd advocate a lot more review and redundancy. I suppose the alternative is to do more cheap probes and accept a higher failure level. I suspect there's a reasonable trade-off somewhere in there.

Foreign Affairs is shrill -- and against Bush

Brett Marston: A GOOD WAY TO SPEND 9 BUCKS THIS MONTH (13 IN CANADA)

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By Brett's telling, Foreign Affairs sounds pretty shrill.

Another Republican (former Senator) now voting for Kerry

'Frightened to death' of Bush

'Frightened to death' of Bush
By Marlow W. Cook
Special to The Courier-Journal

I have been, and will continue to be, a Republican. But when we as a party send the wrong person to the White House, then it is our responsibility to send him home if our nation suffers as a result of his actions. I fall in the category of good conservative thinkers, like George F. Will, for instance, who wrote: "This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and having thought, to have second thoughts."

I say, well done George Will, or, even better, from the mouth of the numero uno of conservatives, William F. Buckley Jr.: "If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war."

... I hope you all have noticed the Bush administration's style in the campaign so far. All negative, trashing Sen. John Kerry, Sen. John Edwards and Democrats in general. Not once have they said what they have done right, what they have done wrong or what they have not done at all.

Lyndon Johnson said America could have guns and butter at the same time. This administration says you can have guns, butter and no taxes at the same time. God help us if we are not smart enough to know that is wrong, and we live by it to our peril. We in this nation have a serious problem. Its almost worse than terrorism: We are broke. Our government is borrowing a billion dollars a day. They are now borrowing from the government pension program, for apparently they have gotten as much out of the Social Security Trust as it can take. Our House and Senate announce weekly grants for every kind of favorite local programs to save legislative seats, and it's all borrowed money.

... I am not enamored with John Kerry, but I am frightened to death of George Bush. I fear a secret government. I abhor a government that refuses to supply the Congress with requested information. I am against a government that refuses to tell the country with whom the leaders of our country sat down and determined our energy policy, and to prove how much they want to keep that secret, they took it all the way to the Supreme Court.

Those of you who are fiscal conservatives and abhor our staggering debt, tell your conservative friends, "Vote for Kerry," because without Bush to control the Congress, the first thing lawmakers will demand Kerry do is balance the budget.

The wonderful thing about this country is its gift of citizenship, then it's freedom to register as one sees fit. For me, as a Republican, I feel that when my party gives me a dangerous leader who flouts the truth, takes the country into an undeclared war and then adds a war on terrorism to it without debate by the Congress, we have a duty to rid ourselves of those who are taking our country on a perilous ride in the wrong direction.

If we are indeed the party of Lincoln (I paraphrase his words), a president who deems to have the right to declare war at will without the consent of the Congress is a president who far exceeds his power under our Constitution.

I will take John Kerry for four years to put our country on the right path.

The writer, a Republican formerly of Louisville, was Jefferson County judge from 1962-1968 and U.S. senator from Kentucky from 1968-1975.

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I'm convinced a large number of thoughtful Republicans want Clinton back - with a Republican congress. They don't dare to say it, but they know deep down that Kerry is basically Clinton with more discipline.

How can Boston fans take this punishment?

Sports News Article | Reuters.com: Rallying Red Sox Edge Yankees to Force Decider The Red Sox seem determined to inflict maximum agony on their fans. It looked like they would give their fans a quick and painless oblivion, but now they're back inflicting agonizing torments. Boston, we feel for you.

Update: I actually watched the 9th inning. I didn't want to watch too much, I was sure I'd jinx the Sox. My sister-in-law is the Sox fan, not me -- but like most of the universe I was hoping for a miracle.

Now I believe Kerry can win.

Smallpox and Influenza

Smallpox - where did the money go?

I googled on "smallpox and influenza" and came up with this 2003 article. It's a good starting point for a question that no-one ever asks (except, every few months, me). Maybe, given the influenza debacle of 2004, this might come up again.

In the build-up to the Iraq invasion there was much mention of the Iraqi smallpox program, and the evil and nefarious "Dr. Germ" (who is, by most accounts, a pretty nasty woman). There was a heck of a lot of press on this. The usual suspects (Rumsfeld, Condy, Cheney, Bush) raised the specter of bioterrorism and a smallpox attack. They made a persuasive case. Persuaded me anyway!

A big prevention program started up. Physicians and nurses were immunized. Some had nasty side-effects. I think at least one person died from an idiosyncratic reaction to Vaccinia (an odd virus that acts in some people like a "mild" case of smallpox).

Then came the invasion of Iraq. The immunization program was quietly dropped. (Later data suggests Americans are probably still protected by the immunizations of the 1960s -- but that wasn't known when the program was dropped.) It staggers on with a low level of funding and no political support.

So was the program always a fraud to provide support for the invasion? If so, that was one hell of a game to play. I suspect the persons injured in the vaccine testing might not feel happy about that.

Or was the fear genuine, but the Bush administration decided that meeting the challenge could pose an electoral risk -- so they decided to ignore the problem? That doesn't reflect well on them either. I wonder if that's the same kind of reasoning they applied when they were warned about the influenza vaccine problems.

It was when I realized that there was no good answer to the smallpox scam that I recognized what kind of government we had. Until then I was willing to give Bush a bit of trust.

Maybe they just figured that the power of their Will would defeat nature. Just like in that movie.

PS. I suspect Dr. Germ will only be released after the election is done. If she were released before November 2nd, she might stir some unwanted memories.

Triumph of The Will -- The Bush Story

Faughnan's Notes: Bush - American Calvinist -- more quotes from the NYT Magazine Suskind article

I was trying to remember what was so familiar about the quotes in the Suskind article. Then it came to me. Similar expressions were a part of a famous movie: Triumph of The Will.

Yes, that was a movie Karl Rove would understand very well.

Update: This has occurred to a few other people.

Bush suppresses CIA 9/11 report

Secret CIA 9/11 Report Names Names | The Regular

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From the LA Times. The CIA apparently finds negligence and a failure of accountability in the Bush administration. Sounds like it may confirm Richard Clarke's account -- and more. It's become known to anyone who cares that the CIA now serves the President - not the nation. I think this bothers some patriots in the CIA.

Slate Election Scorecard Oct 19

Election Scorecard - Where the presidential race stands today. By William Saletan, David Kenner, and Louisa Herron Thomas

Kerry 284
Bush 254

I'm going to see if I can take election day as a vaction day to help get out the vote.

Yes Bush Can! Take the Patriot Pledge!

Take the Patriot Pledge!

I volunteer to have a permanent nuclear waste storage facility in my community.
I volunteer to lobby local, state, and federal officials for a permanent nuclear waste storage facility in my community.
I would personally feel more secure with America launching a new round of nuclear weapons development, even if this meant breaking current treaty obligations concerning nuclear weapons.

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Hmm. Maybe this isn't really a pro-Bush site.

Billions misplaced in Iraq

William Gibson

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Not just a little bit lost. Utterly lost. Billions. Enough to start 100 robust companies. Enough for 100 persons to retire in comfort. Enough to pay health coverage for a year for 100,000 families.

Enough to pay for a massive terrorist attack on America.

Loose change.

Bush - American Calvinist -- more quotes from the NYT Magazine Suskind article

William Gibson

'In the summer of 2002, after I [Ron Susskind] had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'

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I am literally feeling goosebumps. Goering would have said exactly the same thing. In fact, I'm sure he must have.

I posted earlier on this NYT Magazine essay by Ron Susskind (of O'Neill book fame), but it's long and I hadn't read all of it.

Was the senior advisor a neocon? Do they realize how much they sound like Hitler's aides?

Here are some more excerpts. They paint a pretty clear picture.

... All of this -- the ''gut'' and ''instincts,'' the certainty and religiosity -connects to a single word, ''faith,'' and faith asserts its hold ever more on debates in this country and abroad. That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness.

The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were surprised to see in the first presidential debate are familiar expressions to those in the administration or in Congress who have simply asked the president to explain his positions. Since 9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush's intolerance of doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question him now...

... In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. In those days, there were high hopes that the United States-sponsored ''road map'' for the Israelis and Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing peacekeeping forces in the region. The problem, everyone agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman -- the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress -- mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.

''I don't know why you're talking about Sweden,'' Bush said. ''They're the neutral one. They don't have an army.''

Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: ''Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They're the ones that are historically neutral, without an army.'' Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.

Bush held to his view. ''No, no, it's Sweden that has no army.''

The room went silent, until someone changed the subject. [jf: weeks later Bush does concede that Sweden has an army] ...

... Such challenges -- from either Powell or his opposite number as the top official in domestic policy, Paul O'Neill -- were trials that Bush had less and less patience for as the months passed. He made that clear to his top lieutenants. Gradually, Bush lost what Richard Perle, who would later head a largely private-sector group under Bush called the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had described as his open posture during foreign-policy tutorials prior to the 2000 campaign. (''He had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know very much,'' Perle said.) By midyear 2001, a stand-and-deliver rhythm was established. Meetings, large and small, started to take on a scripted quality. Even then, the circle around Bush was tightening. Top officials, from cabinet members on down, were often told when they would speak in Bush's presence, for how long and on what topic. The president would listen without betraying any reaction. Sometimes there would be cross-discussions -- Powell and Rumsfeld, for instance, briefly parrying on an issue -- but the president would rarely prod anyone with direct, informed questions. ..

... A few months later, on Feb. 1, 2002, Jim Wallis of the Sojourners stood in the Roosevelt Room for the introduction of Jim Towey as head of the president's faith-based and community initiative...

... Bush saw Wallis. He bounded over and grabbed the cheeks of his face, one in each hand, and squeezed. ''Jim, how ya doin', how ya doin'!'' he exclaimed. Wallis was taken aback. Bush excitedly said that his massage therapist had given him Wallis's book, ''Faith Works.'' His joy at seeing Wallis, as Wallis and others remember it, was palpable -- a president, wrestling with faith and its role at a time of peril, seeing that rare bird: an independent counselor. Wallis recalls telling Bush he was doing fine, '''but in the State of the Union address a few days before, you said that unless we devote all our energies, our focus, our resources on this war on terrorism, we're going to lose.' I said, 'Mr. President, if we don't devote our energy, our focus and our time on also overcoming global poverty and desperation, we will lose not only the war on poverty, but we'll lose the war on terrorism.'''

Bush replied that that was why America needed the leadership of Wallis and other members of the clergy.

''No, Mr. President,'' Wallis says he told Bush, ''We need your leadership on this question, and all of us will then commit to support you. Unless we drain the swamp of injustice in which the mosquitoes of terrorism breed, we'll never defeat the threat of terrorism.''

Bush looked quizzically at the minister, Wallis recalls. They never spoke again after that.

''When I was first with Bush in Austin, what I saw was a self-help Methodist, very open, seeking,'' Wallis says now. ''What I started to see at this point was the man that would emerge over the next year -- a messianic American Calvinist. He doesn't want to hear from anyone who doubts him.''

... George W. Bush, clearly, is one of history's great confidence men. That is not meant in the huckster's sense, though many critics claim that on the war in Iraq, the economy and a few other matters he has engaged in some manner of bait-and-switch. No, I mean it in the sense that he's a believer in the power of confidence. At a time when constituents are uneasy and enemies are probing for weaknesses, he clearly feels that unflinching confidence has an almost mystical power. It can all but create reality....

... George W. Bush and his team have constructed a high-performance electoral engine. The soul of this new machine is the support of millions of likely voters, who judge his worth based on intangibles -- character, certainty, fortitude and godliness -- rather than on what he says or does. The deeper the darkness, the brighter this filament of faith glows, a faith in the president and the just God who affirms him...

.. Every few months, a report surfaces of the president using strikingly Messianic language, only to be dismissed by the White House. Three months ago, for instance, in a private meeting with Amish farmers in Lancaster County, Pa., Bush was reported to have said, ''I trust God speaks through me.'' In this ongoing game of winks and nods, a White House spokesman denied the president had specifically spoken those words, but noted that ''his faith helps him in his service to people.''

... Come to the hustings on Labor Day and meet the base. In 2004, you know a candidate by his base, and the Bush campaign is harnessing the might of churches, with hordes of voters registering through church-sponsored programs. Following the news of Bush on his national tour in the week after the Republican convention, you could sense how a faith-based president campaigns: on a surf of prayer and righteous rage.

... And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. ''You think he's an idiot, don't you?'' I said, no, I didn't. ''No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!'' In this instance, the final ''you,'' of course, meant the entire reality-based community.

The bond between Bush and his base is a bond of mutual support. He supports them with his actions, doing his level best to stand firm on wedge issues like abortion and same-sex marriage while he identifies evil in the world, at home and abroad. They respond with fierce faith. The power of this transaction is something that people, especially those who are religious, tend to connect to their own lives. If you have faith in someone, that person is filled like a vessel. Your faith is the wind beneath his or her wings. That person may well rise to the occasion and surprise you: I had faith in you, and my faith was rewarded. Or, I know you've been struggling, and I need to pray harder.

... In the end, Bush doesn't have to say he's ordained by God. After a day of speeches by Hardy Billington and others, it goes without saying.

''To me, I just believe God controls everything, and God uses the president to keep evil down, to see the darkness and protect this nation,'' Billington told me, voicing an idea shared by millions of Bush supporters. ''Other people will not protect us. God gives people choices to make. God gave us this president to be the man to protect the nation at this time.''

But when the moment came in the V.I.P. tent to shake Bush's hand, Billington remembered being reserved. '''I really thank God that you're the president' was all I told him.'' Bush, he recalled, said, ''Thank you.''

''He knew what I meant,'' Billington said. ''I believe he's an instrument of God, but I have to be careful about what I say, you know, in public.''

... "I'm going to be real positive, while I keep my foot on John Kerry's throat,'' George W. Bush said last month at a confidential luncheon a block away from the White House with a hundred or so of his most ardent, longtime supporters, the so-called R.N.C. Regents. This was a high-rolling crowd -- at one time or another, they had all given large contributions to Bush or the Republican National Committee. Bush had known many of them for years, and a number of them had visited him at the ranch. It was a long way from Poplar Bluff.

The Bush these supporters heard was a triumphal Bush, actively beginning to plan his second term. It is a second term, should it come to pass, that will alter American life in many ways, if predictions that Bush voiced at the luncheon come true.

... He said that there will be an opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court justice shortly after his inauguration, and perhaps three more high-court vacancies during his second term...

... Bush said: ''I'm going to push nuclear energy, drilling in Alaska and clean coal. Some nuclear-fusion technologies are interesting.'' He mentions energy from ''processing corn.''

... ''I'm going to come out strong after my swearing in,'' Bush said, ''with fundamental tax reform, tort reform, privatizing of Social Security.'' The victories he expects in November, he said, will give us ''two years, at least, until the next midterm. We have to move quickly, because after that I'll be quacking like a duck.''

... The president, listing priorities for his second term, placed near the top of his agenda the expansion of federal support for faith-based institutions. The president talked at length about giving the initiative the full measure of his devotion and said that questions about separation of church and state were not an issue.

... Bush grew into one of history's most forceful leaders, his admirers will attest, by replacing hesitation and reasonable doubt with faith and clarity. Many more will surely tap this high-voltage connection of fervent faith and bold action. In politics, the saying goes, anything that works must be repeated until it is replaced by something better. The horizon seems clear of competitors.

Can the unfinished American experiment in self-governance -- sputtering on the watery fuel of illusion and assertion -- deal with something as nuanced as the subtleties of one man's faith? What, after all, is the nature of the particular conversation the president feels he has with God -- a colloquy upon which the world now precariously turns?

That very issue is what Jim Wallis wishes he could sit and talk about with George W. Bush. That's impossible now, he says. He is no longer invited to the White House.

''Faith can cut in so many ways,'' he said. ''If you're penitent and not triumphal, it can move us to repentance and accountability and help us reach for something higher than ourselves. That can be a powerful thing, a thing that moves us beyond politics as usual, like Martin Luther King did. But when it's designed to certify our righteousness -- that can be a dangerous thing. Then it pushes self-criticism aside. There's no reflection.

''Where people often get lost is on this very point,'' he said after a moment of thought. ''Real faith, you see, leads us to deeper reflection and not -- not ever -- to the thing we as humans so very much want.''

And what is that?

''Easy certainty.''

A serious discussion of taxing only "sales" (value added taxation)

The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Economic View: What if a Sales Tax Were the Only Tax?

It's ludicrous of course. A federal sales tax (VAT) has a role in overall taxation, but not as a sole item. Altman demolishes the Bush fantasy of a primary sales tax with a few simple questions.

Flu vaccine shortage: a failure of Republican governance

The New York Times > Health > With Few Suppliers of Flu Shots, Shortage Was Long in Making

The shortage caught many Americans by surprise, but it followed decades of warnings from health experts who said the nation's system for vaccine supply and distribution was growing increasingly fragile.

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Governments are responsible for vaccine programs. This is a failure of government. Certainly a failure of the Bush regime, but it's older than that. I suspect it's a failure of congress rather than the executive branch -- which makes it a classic failure of Republican governance.

It resembles the same failure in governance that led to the fragility of our electrical infrastructure.

Republicans don't do infrastructure.

Republicans can be the most shrill of all ...

The New York Times > Magazine > Without a Doubt

'Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . .

''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.''

---

There's a wing of the Republican Party that prides itself on a gimlet eyed rationalism. They're panicking now. They REALLY want Bush to lose.

Among the bad news -- a ray of light

The New York Times > Health > Malaria Vaccine Proves Effective

... The vaccine, tested on thousands of children in Mozambique, was hardly perfect: It protected them from catching the disease only about 30 percent of the time and prevented it from becoming life-threatening only about 58 percent of the time.

But because malaria kills more than a million people a year, 700,000 of them children, even partial protection would be a public health victory. The disease, caused by a parasite carried by mosquitoes, is found in 90 countries, and drug-resistant strains are spreading.

Dr. Allan Schapira, strategy coordinator for the Roll Back Malaria campaign at the World Health Organization, said the trial was "good news, and definitely of great interest for malaria control."

The director of the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, which is underwriting tests on 15 experimental vaccines with money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said the GlaxoSmithKline product tried in Mozambique was now its leading candidate and had proved that the concept worked.

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ONLY 58% reduction in life threatening disease?!! If this holds up with limited toxicity, Bill Gates will win the Nobel Peace Prize while the vaccine developers will win the Nobel in Medicine.

This is huge. Ok, so it's an early study with small numbers. Maybe too soon to light the fireworks. Still, the Carnegie-Mellons salvaged some honor by their good works. Gates intends to exceed past tyrants of capitalism in both capitalistic savagery and post-triumph generosity.

Slashdot | Data Miners Moving to Offshore Data Havens

Slashdot | Data Miners Moving to Offshore Data Havens

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Privacy is so dead -- except for the ultra-rich. The interesting question is how the privacy market will evolve in an essentially libertarian market.

One may expect all kinds of interesting trends. I think all these and more have been covered in science fiction stories of the past 20 years or so.

1. Noise generators: software and techniques that create false data, creating privacy by masking real data in a cloud of flase data. The same techniques used to filter spam may be used to identify the "true data".

2. Privacy scams: a form of noise generation. Since this is an unregulated industry a variety of data vendors will undercut one another on price -- while faking their own data.

3. High quality high cost vendors. Vendors who guarantee truth and accuracy and command a premium price. They might even allow victims to correct their (once) personal data.

4. An entire industry devoted to helping people create fake profiles, obscure their profiles, counter false and/or negative data ...

The current practices of Homeland Security into the low (fraudelent, lowball) range of the privacy vendor spectrum.

PS. The US government has dodged governmental rules for decades, including privacy rules, by moving data projects out of government and into the private sector. This offshore move, mediated by longtime government contractors, is just the next logical step.

How adolescent and adult brains differ. By Amanda Schaffer

Head Case - Roper v. Simmons asks how adolescent and adult brains differ. By Amanda Schaffer

Indeed, using brain-imaging techniques, it may be possible to show that many people who commit violent crimes have aberrant prefrontal cortical activity, or other brain features that differ from those of the average adult.

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Indeed. And so it begins -- the slow evolution of human thinking moves into a new cycle.

Sometine in the next 100 years the foundational concept of "responsibility" will begin to shift and sag. In the absence of a soul it is a hollow idea. What is a woman then, but the product of chance? Virtuous or neglectful, brilliant or average, spiritual or concreate -- all is but throws of the dice.

In some variations of Christianity it is said that God loves all humankind. This is not widely accepted. Presumably the list of God's beloveds would then include Hitler, Stalin, Mao, bin Laden, Ghengis Khan and a myriad of other "evil" humans. If, one day, we decide they were all tragic victims of misfortune, will we then be ready to talk with God?

Cheney threatens to attack the US

The Onion | Cheney Vows To Attack U.S. If Kerry Elected

'If the wrong man is elected in November, the nation will come under a devastating armed attack of an unimaginable magnitude, one planned and executed by none other than myself,' Cheney said, speaking at a rally in Greensboro, NC. 'When they go to the polls, Americans must weigh this fact and decide if our nation can ignore such a grave threat.'

Added Cheney: 'It would be a tragedy to suffer another attack on American soil, let alone one perpetrated by an enemy as well-organized and well-equipped as I am. My colleagues and I urge voters to keep their safety in mind when they go to the polls.'

Although Cheney would not comment on the details of his proposed attack on a John Kerry-led U.S., national-security experts said he possesses both the capabilities and the motivation to pose a serious threat.

'There is no question that Cheney has the financial assets and intelligence needed to pose a threat to our nation,' said Peter Bergen, terrorism researcher and author of Threats And Balances: Former Executive Branch Officials And The Danger To America. 'After all, this fanatic can call upon the resources of both the Republican Party and Halliburton to aid him in his assault. America would be foolish not to take his warning seriously.'

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Really, but Bush/Cheney standards, not so big a step.

One of the whackier bin Laden/Bush conspiracy theories ...

Ok, so this is ineptly translated wild-eyed tin hat stuff. It's also now new. Thinking about it a bit, I remember that after the Afghan war it was speculated that China would be a great refuge for bin Laden. China, Afghanistan and Pakistan all meet (more or less) in one of the most beautiful, harsh, complex and exotic parts of the earth. I rather doubt they have stringent border controls. It's also somewhat risky for the US to run covert ops into China.

So, yeah, bin Laden could be there. I think it's rather less likely that the Chinese government would strike a deal with him, though who's to say they're any smarter than the current US regime.

Bottom line -- as journalism this has about as much value as wild-eyed blogger ravings. As an indicator of what people think and talk about it's interesting.

Bin Laden is in ChinaTranslated from El Mundo, Gordon Thomas 

10/13/04 "El Mundo"  -- During the home stretch of the Northamerican elections, Osama bin Laden could prove to be the ace in the sleeve of president Bush. As we speak, Washington is negotiating a highly secretive agreement with Beijing, the Chinese capital, for the eviction of bin Laden from his sanctuary in the turbulent Muslim provinces of China, in the Northwest of the Great Wall nation. 

More than five million people, many of them fanatic followers of Osama, live in that region, which can be called one of the most volatile regions of Earth. Thousands of them work for the mafias who specialize in the trafficking of humans and drugs to the West. Last summer, Bin Laden sealed an agreement with the authorities in Beijing, in which he was granted asylum in return for his guarantees that the guerilla war of the Muslim Chinese against the Chinese nation would end. 

Over the years, tens of thousands of troops of the Popular Liberation Armee had been sent to the region with the intent to squash the insurgents. 

Since the arrival of the Saudi Osama Bin Laden, the region has been relatively quiet, and the Muslims who live there are allowed to continue their trafficking of humans and drugs. 

However, Bin Laden could now see himself trapped in his refuge, if an extraordinary agreement between Beijing and Washington would come to pass, in which China would hand over to the United States the most wanted terrorist in the world. 

The capture of Bin Laden would virtually guarantee the reelection of George Bush Jr., as it would confirm to the millions of undecided voters of the U.S. that the war against terrorism was judstified after Bin Laden had authorized the attacks of 9/11 against New York and Washington. 

"A new administration Bush would present China as its great new ally in the war against terrorism. China would enjoy in Washington the status of a most favored nation with all of its facets. Contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars would be approved by fast track. The history of human rights violations in China would be ignored," confirmed last week a high-level representative of the Pentagon. He added that only a small number of "members of very high rank" in the Bush administration knew about the plan to "seize Bin Laden in exchange for a special relationship with China." With almost certainty, among them would be the vice-president, Dick Cheney, and the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. 

Agreeing to speak under anonymity, the functionary offered details of the plan to capture Osama Bin Laden as a means to keep Bush in the White House. He explained that this is not the first time that an American administration has resorted to similar maneuvers during an electoral campaign. 

Towards the end of the presidency of Jimmy Carter, a secret deal was signed between the then future president of the U.S., Ronald Reagan, and Iran, in which the American diplomats, who had been kidnapped in Teheran, the Capital of Iran, would be freed the very day that Ronald Reagan would be inaugurated to the White House. 

According to Ari Ben-Menashe, the former national security advisor of the Israeli government of Yitzhak Shamir, " they paid an enormous sum of money to the Ayatollas of Iran." Ben-Menashe affirms that this deal formed a pivotal piece in the negotiations that later became known as Reagan's October surprise. 


Theresa on the campaign trail 

Theresa, the wife of the senator and democratic candidate, John Kerry, gave to understand that another October surprise could be imminent. Two weeks ago, she surprised the political advisors of her husband by declaring in public: "I wouldn't be surprised if, prior to the elections, president Bush were to capture Osama." Since then, Mrs. Kerry rejected to further comment on her explosive declaration. However, there are rumors in the intelligence community that both she and her husband had been advised that any further comments concerning an agreement that would include the capture of Bin Laden could comprimise the national security of the U.S. 

Furthermore, also the Washington analyst, Al Santoli, the national security advisor and Californian Congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, and the editor of the respected bulletin China Monitor, affirmed that "an October surprise wouldn't surprise me in the least." 

In his first confirmed sighting in many months, the refuge of Bin Laden has been pinpointed by an NSA satellite, one of many that the supersecret U.S. agency utilizes in their search for him. His hideout is located near a lake at the border between China and Pakistan. 

At the other side of the Zaskar mountains, the white summits that majestically look out over Bin Laden's sanctuary, a detachment of special forces of the Pakistani and U.S. armies are awaiting orders to capture Bin Laden, and move him by plane to Pakistan. 

Escorted by 50 guerillas 

During the last six months, Bin Laden has been sighted several times in the mountains and open ranges of the Northwest. American intelligence agents in the region are of the opinion that the Saudi millionaire, accompanied by an escort of 50 guerilla mujaheddin, moved East towards Cachemira, and from there crossed into China. 

The agents furthermore believe that, previously, Bin Laden held various meetings with high officials of Beijing. He convinced them that he would be capable of obtaining peace in their Muslim provinces. "We know about these meetings," confirmed Mansur Ahmed, police chief of Bandipoor, North of Cachemira. "However, they took place on Chinese territory." 

Bin Laden is accompanied by Ayan al-Zawahiri, his primary advisor and personal physician (Bin Laden suffers from a serious renal ailment). Al-Zawahiri is a surgeon, educated in Cairo, accused of terrosrism in Egypt, and condemned to death for rebellion. After Bin Laden, he is the second most wanted terrorist world-wide. 

White House sources reject to comment on this issue publicly. "If the negotiations should fail, this would not be the most suitable moment for the president to be seen directly involved in these negotiations," affirmed one source. 

It is believed that the possibility for such a deal emerged early this year, after Donald Rumsfeld had met with a delegation of the Chinese government during a visit to the far East. Later, George Tenet, then director of the CIA, requested a viability study for an operation to capture Bin Laden. Tenet was informed that the only possibility would be if they could count on the cooperation of the Chinese. 

"To what extent that collaboration will occur in the few weeks remaining until the elections, will depend to a good extent on the confidence

---

Gibson returns to blogging -- and he's not exactly a fan of GWB

William Gibson

Why?

Because the United States currently has, as Jack Womack so succintly puts it, a president who makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln.

And because, as the Spanish philospher Unamuno said, "At times, to be silent is to lie.

Bush - Nixon Redux

The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: Will We Need a New 'All the President's Men'?

... if our current presidency is now showing symptoms of a precancerous Watergate syndrome - as it is, daily - we have not yet reached that denouement immortalized by Hollywood, in which our scrappy heroes finally bring Nixon to heel in his second term. No, we're back instead in the earlier reels of his first term, before the criminality of the Watergate break-in, when no one had heard of Woodward and Bernstein. Back then an arrogant and secretive White House, furious at the bad press fueled by an unpopular and mismanaged war, was still flying high as it kneecapped with impunity any reporter or news organization that challenged its tightly enforced message of victory at hand.

It was then that the vice president, Spiro Agnew, scripted by the speechwriter Pat Buchanan, tried to discredit the press as an elite - or, as he spelled it out, "a tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men." It was then that the attorney general, John Mitchell, under the pretext of national security, countenanced wiretaps of Hedrick Smith of The Times and Marvin Kalb of CBS News, as well as a full F.B.I. investigation of CBS's Daniel Schorr. Today it's John Ashcroft's Justice Department, also invoking "national security," that hopes to seize the phone records of Judith Miller and Philip Shenon of The Times, claiming that what amounts to a virtual wiretap is warranted by articles about Islamic charities and terrorism published nearly three years ago.

"The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before," wrote William Safire last month. When an alumnus of the Nixon White House says our free press is being attacked as "never before," you listen. What alarms him now are the efforts of Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame-Robert Novak affair, to threaten reporters at The Times and Time magazine with jail if they don't reveal their sources. Given that the Times reporter in question (Judith Miller again) didn't even write an article on the subject under investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald overreaches so far that he's created a sci-fi plot twist out of Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report."

It's all the scarier for being only one piece in a pattern of media intimidation that's been building for months now. Once Woodward and Bernstein did start investigating Watergate, Nixon plotted to take economic revenge by siccing the Federal Communications Commission on TV stations owned by The Washington Post's parent company. The current White House has been practicing pre-emptive media intimidation to match its policy of pre-emptive war. Its F.C.C. chairman, using Janet Jackson's breast and Howard Stern's mouth as pretexts, has sufficiently rattled Viacom, which broadcast both of these entertainers' infractions against "decency," that its chairman, the self-described "liberal Democrat" Sumner Redstone, abruptly announced his support for the re-election of George W. Bush last month. "I vote for what's good for Viacom," he explained, and he meant it. He took this loyalty oath just days after the "60 Minutes" fiasco prompted a full-fledged political witch hunt on Viacom's CBS News, another Republican target since the Nixon years. Representative Joe Barton, Republican of Texas, has threatened to seek Congressional "safeguards" regulating TV news content and, depending what happens Nov. 2, he may well have the political means to do it.

Viacom is hardly the only media giant cowed by the prospect that this White House might threaten its corporate interests if it gets out of line. Disney's refusal to release Michael Moore's partisan "Fahrenheit 9/11" in an election year would smell less if the company applied the same principle to its ABC radio stations, where the equally partisan polemics of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are heard every day. Even a low-profile film project in conflict with Bush dogma has spooked the world's largest media company, Time Warner, proprietor of CNN. Its Warner Brothers, about to release a special DVD of "Three Kings," David O. Russell's 1999 movie criticizing the first gulf war, suddenly canceled a planned extra feature, a new Russell documentary criticizing the current war. Whether any of these increasingly craven media combines will stand up to the Bush administration in a constitutional pinch, as Katharine Graham and her Post Company bravely did to the Nixon administration during Watergate, is a proposition that hasn't been remotely tested yet.

To understand what kind of journalism the Bush administration expects from these companies, you need only look at those that are already its collaborators. Fox News speaks loudly for itself, to the point of posting on its Web site an article by its chief political correspondent containing fictional John Kerry quotes. (After an outcry, it was retracted as "written in jest.") But Fox is just the tip of the Rupert Murdoch empire. When The New York Post covered the release of the report by the C.I.A.'s chief weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, it played the story on page 8 and didn't get to the clause "while no stockpiles of W.M.D. were found in Iraq" until the 16th paragraph. This would be an Onion parody were it not deadly serious.

It's hard to imagine an operation more insidious than Mr. Murdoch's, but the Sinclair Broadcast Group may be it. The owner or operator of 62 TV stations nationwide, including affiliates of all four major broadcast networks, this company gets little press scrutiny because it is invisible in New York City, Washington and Los Angeles, where it has no stations. But Sinclair, whose top executives have maxed out as Bush contributors, was first smoked out of the shadows last spring when John McCain called it "unpatriotic" for ordering its eight ABC stations not to broadcast the "Nightline" in which Ted Koppel read the names of the then 721 American casualties in Iraq. This was the day after Paul Wolfowitz had also downsized American casualties by testifying before Congress that they numbered only about 500.

Thanks to Elizabeth Jensen of The Los Angeles Times, who first broke the story last weekend, we now know that Sinclair has grander ambitions for the election. It has ordered all its stations, whose most powerful reach is in swing states like Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, to broadcast a "news" special featuring a film, "Stolen Honor," that trashes Mr. Kerry along the lines of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads. The film's creator is a man who spent nearly eight years in the employ of Tom Ridge. Sinclair has ordered that it be run in prime time during a specific four nights in late October, when it is likely to be sandwiched in with network hits like "CSI," "The Apprentice" and "Desperate Housewives." Democrats are screaming, but don't expect the Bush apparatchiks at federal agencies to pursue their complaints as if they were as serious as a "wardrobe malfunction." A more likely outcome is that Sinclair, which already reaches 24 percent of American viewers, will reap the regulatory favors it is seeking to expand that audience in a second Bush term.

Like the Nixon administration before it, the Bush administration arrived at the White House already obsessed with news management and secrecy. Nixon gave fewer press conferences than any president since Hoover; Mr. Bush has given fewer than any in history. Early in the Nixon years, a special National Press Club study concluded that the president had instituted "an unprecedented, government-wide effort to control, restrict and conceal information." Sound familiar? The current president has seen to it that even future historians won't get access to papers he wants to hide; he quietly gutted the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the very reform enacted by Congress as a post-Watergate antidote to pathological Nixonian secrecy.

The path of the Bush White House as it has moved from Agnew-style press baiting to outright assault has also followed its antecedent. The Nixon administration's first legal attack on the press, a year before the Watergate break-in, was its attempt to stop The Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers, the leaked internal Defense Department history of our failure in Vietnam. Though 9/11 prompted Ari Fleischer's first effort to warn the media to "watch what they say," it's failure in Iraq that has pushed the Bush administration over the edge. It was when Operation Iraqi Freedom was bogged down early on that it spun the fictional saga of Jessica Lynch. It's when the percentage of Americans who felt it was worth going to war in Iraq fell to 50 percent in the Sept. 2003 Gallup poll, down from 73 that April, that identically worded letters "signed" by different soldiers mysteriously materialized in 11 American newspapers, testifying that security for Iraq's citizens had been "largely restored." (As David Greenberg writes in his invaluable "Nixon's Shadow," phony letters to news outlets were also a favorite Nixon tactic.) The legal harassment of the press, like the Republican party's Web-driven efforts to discredit specific journalists even at non-CBS networks, has escalated in direct ratio to the war's decline in support.

"What you're seeing on your TV screens," the president said when minimizing the Iraq insurgency in May, are "the desperate tactics of a hateful few." Maybe that's the sunny news that can be found on a Sinclair station. Now, with our election less than three weeks away, the bad news coming out of Iraq everywhere else is a torrent. Reporters at virtually every news organization describe a downward spiral so dangerous that they can't venture anywhere in Iraq without risking their lives. Last weekend marines spoke openly and by name to Steve Fainaru of The Washington Post about the quagmire they're witnessing firsthand and its irrelevance to battling Al Qaeda, whose 9/11 attack motivated many of them to enlist in the first place. "Every day you read the articles in the States where it's like, 'Oh, it's getting better and better," said Lance Cpl. Jonathan Snyder of Gettysburg, Pa. "But when you're here, you know it's worse every day." Another marine, Lance Cpl. Alexander Jones of Ball Ground, Ga., told Mr. Fainaru: "We're basically proving out that the government is wrong. We're catching them in a lie." Asked if he was concerned that he and his buddies might be punished for speaking out, Cpl. Brandon Autin of New Iberia, La., responded: "What are they going to do - send us to Iraq?"

What "they" can do is try to intimidate, harass, discredit and prosecute news organizations that report stories like this. If history is any guide, and the hubris of re-election is tossed into the mix, that harrowing drama can go on for a long time before we get to the feel-good final act of "All the President's Men."

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These are the days to try the souls of journalists. Some will rise to greatness, some will pay a severe price for resistance. Frank Rich is a risin'.

GOP front destroying democrat voter registration documents?

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: October 10, 2004 - October 16, 2004 Archives

Fascinating. Employees of Voters Outreach of America, a GOP-funded voter registration outfit operating in Nevada, say they personally witnessed company employees shredding hundreds or even thousands of Democratic registrations. Now the same company (VOA) is being accused of destroying Democratic registration forms in Oregon.

The head of VOA is Nathan Sproul, a Republican political consultant who used to be the executive director of the Arizona state Republican party.

In gaining access to venues to register voters, he has apparently been claiming that his group is part of America Votes, a voter education and registration groups put together by a consortium of Democrat-leaning groups like the AFL-CIO, Emily's List, the Sierra Club and others.

A quick scan of Nexis shows Sproul's outfit is also operating in West Virginia (see Charleston Gazette, August 20th), where they've already raised some controversy for misleading tactics if not destroying legally valid registrations.

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If true, it's another measure of how low the Republican Party has sunk. This sounds like the tricks developed during the era of American apartheid.

Bush Like Me - an anti-Republican puts on wolf's clothing

Bush Like Me - an anti-Republican puts on wolf's clothing
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/6539082?pageid=rs.Home&pageregion=single7&rnd=1097529183054&has-player=false
RollingStone.com: Politics - Bush Like Me

Republicans are everywhere, but everywhere is not a good place to look for them. For my purposes I wanted to try to catch them in their ideal habitat. That was why I chose Orlando. For me, it is hell on earth, the worst city on the planet, a place that would make me long for Kinshasa or Volokolamsk. But for Republicans, it is ideal: a scorching-hot paved inland archipelago of garish shopping malls and stadium-size steel-and-glass Baptist churches, a place with no nonhuman life apart from the caged animals at the theme parks, and an entire economy organized around monstrous temples to fake experience.

... Part of my job, I soon came to understand, was to be supportive when people like portly Tampa sheriff's deputy Ben Mills came in to share their very serious utopian ideas -- like the benefits of having a society guarded by a clone army. "We'd save a hell of a lot on benefits and medical expenses," he said. " 'Cause you know if they got wounded..."

"You could just shoot them," I said.

"Exactly -- pow! Just shoot 'em dead, right in the ground."

He went on.

"We'd just have a big breeding farm in Colorado," he said. "Course, it'd be a security problem if they got out, you know, if you had rogue clones running around. You'd have to have a special security force to maintain 'em."

"That's where folks like us would come in," I said.

"Exactly," he said.

Folks like us. I was getting the hang of it.

... During my time on the campaign, I noticed an unusual phenomenon. The more involved a person was with the campaign, the more likely he was to be politically moderate. Most of the core group of our office -- Vienna, Rhyan, Ben, Don -- were quietly pro-choice or socially liberal in some other respect. It was the casual volunteers and the people whose only involvement was a bumper sticker who were likely to rant about liberals being traitors and agents of Islamo-Fascism who should be exiled from the country or jailed, etc.

I saw this clearly one weekend at a local gun show, where we were manning a voter-registration booth. I rotated with Rhyan and Vienna that weekend, and all three of us were quietly freaking out at the sight of all these fat weirdos from the sticks buying huge assault rifles and Confederate bumper stickers with messages such as IF I'D KNOWN THIS WOULD HAPPEN, I'D HAVE PICKED MY OWN COTTON.

"Man, I'm glad I'm a socially liberal Republican," whispered Rhyan at one point, laughing.

... . The problem not only with fundamentalist Christians but with Republicans in general is not that they act on blind faith, without thinking. The problem is that they are incorrigible doubters with an insatiable appetite for Evidence. What they get off on is not Believing, but in having their beliefs tested. That's why their conversations and their media are so completely dominated by implacable bogeymen: marrying gays, liberals, the ACLU, Sean Penn, Europeans and so on. Their faith both in God and in their political convictions is too weak to survive without an unceasing string of real and imaginary confrontations with those people -- and for those confrontations, they are constantly assembling evidence and facts to make their case.

But here's the twist. They are not looking for facts with which to defeat opponents. They are looking for facts that ensure them an ever-expanding roster of opponents. They can be correct facts, incorrect facts, irrelevant facts, it doesn't matter. The point is not to win the argument, the point is to make sure the argument never stops. Permanent war isn't a policy imposed from above; it's an emotional imperative that rises from the bottom. In a way, it actually helps if the fact is dubious or untrue (like the Swift-boat business), because that guarantees an argument. You're arguing the particulars, where you're right, while they're arguing the underlying generalities, where they are...

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It's a curious article. In places he's sympathetic, in others caustic. He makes some interesting observations, but ends seeming rather puzzled and confused.

I do need to rise to the defense of Orlando. Disneyworld is not to my tastes, but there's still a bit left of the town of old Orlanda, and it's fairly interesting.

Insurgent Alliance Is Fraying In Fallujah (washingtonpost.com)

Insurgent Alliance Is Fraying In Fallujah (washingtonpost.com)

If accurate, it suggests the sensor guided missile strikes in Fallujah have been quite effective. It also suggests that Fallujahns, to some extent, have been repulsed by the cruel and brutal beheadings of foreigners and of non-Sunni Iraqis. If the "foreign terrorists" lose local support, it will be increasingly easy for the Iraqi and US forces to find allies willing to plant sensors near Zarqawi's forces.

Sinclair Broadcast Group Advertisers - Boycott Page

Sinclair Broadcast Group Advertisers

The Sinclair group is a set of networks owned by a group of radical Bush supporters. They're publishing an anti-Kerry slander that's probably illegal, but they know any consequences will be mild and will be post-election.

This site lists advertisers to contact.

Is this what Rove means by his "October Surprise"?

Boing Boing: Law enforcement memo of "imminent" terror attack?

... At the meeting of the Southern District of the Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council (ATAC) that was held yesterday in Houston, US Attorney Michael Shelby informed the group that a terrorist attack of 09/11/01 proportions was going to be carried out on US soil within the next 6 weeks.

Mr. Shelby stated that on 09/13/04, US Attorney General John Ashcroft had a conference call with all 93 US Attorneys, an event which is extremely rare. The US Attorneys were informed that without a doubt an attack was going to be perpetrated in the US within the next 6 weeks, prior to the elections. Mr. Shelby urgently requested that all law enforcement be aware of any situation that may be out of the ordinary and report the activity immediately. Mr. Shelby also requested that we get the word out to patrol officers and detectives to talk to their informants and report anything odd or remotely suspicious. Mr. Shelby ended this warning by saying that unless we get a bit of "luck" and the attack can be detected and prevented, that another attack of 9/11 scale will be carried out.

... A Democratic senator said he will close his Capitol Hill office until after the November 2 election, fearing a possible terrorist attack that could harm his staff or visitors.

Sen. Mark Dayton of Minnesota issued a statement Tuesday, citing a 'top-secret intelligence report on our national security' provided to congressional members by Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tennessee 'Based upon that information,' Dayton wrote, 'I have decided to close my office in the Russell Senate Office Building until after the upcoming election.

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Dayton's web site says nothing about his office closing, but CNN reports it has been shut. Weird.

Unfortunately Bush/Ashcroft/Rove vaporized any trust I had in them, so I can't say whether:

1. This is a typical anxiety induced response to a scam or a mangled rumor.
2. This is a rational assessment of a real threat.
3. This is a scam by Karl Rove to boost Bush in the polls.

I'm betting on all three.

Pre-eclampsia -- tracking down a terrible disorder

BBC NEWS | Health | Clue to pregnancy disorder found

The natural killer cells, which are part of the mother's immune defence system that fights infection and foreign invaders, help to set up the blood vessels in the placenta needed to feed the baby.

In pre-eclampsia, the blood supply is compromised for some reason.

The scientists found the women with pre-eclampsia had different genes controlling the chemical signals than the healthy women.

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This sounds like true progress. Over the past 5-10 years we may have begun to disentangle the mechanisms of a terrible disorder. Pre-eclampsia is usually managed successfully, but every so often a healthy woman dies in an particularly terrible manner.

Amazing to think that the cells we named "Natural Killer (NK)" help build the placenta. Maybe they could be renamed? (The consequences of naming in biology are manifold.)

There has been much speculation about the evolutionary basis of pre-eclampsia. Mostly it focuses on the degree to which a mother and a fetus are in a state of low level war, reflecting competition between parternal and maternal genes. The paternal genes want "more" from the mother's body, the maternal genes want "less". This is an ancient war -- and only the dynamic tension between the two permits a healthy baby and mother. If the paternal genes lose the baby dies, if the maternal genes lose the mother and baby die.

That's the theory anyway. Maybe we'll find out more soon. I'm not sure how the "intelligent design" folks explain there kinds of mechanisms.

ABC has a spine?

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: October 03, 2004 - October 09, 2004 Archives: "The plain intent of the memo is to tell ABC reporters that they should feel neither obligated nor permitted to equate the level of deceptiveness of the Kerry and Bush campaign's if and when they are in fact not equal."

The perils of living with lackeys

The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: Why Did James Baker Turn Bush Into Nixon?

... But those who live by Fox News can die by Fox News. If you limit your diet to Fox and its talk-radio and blogging satellites, you may think that the only pressing non-Laci Peterson, non-Kobe, non-hurricane stories are "Rathergate" and the antics of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Your diet of bad news from Iraq is restricted, and Abu Ghraib becomes an over-the-top frat hazing. You are certain that John Kerry can't score in the debates because everyone knows he's an overtanned, overmanicured metrosexual. You reside in such an isolated echo chamber that you aren't aware that even the third-rated network news broadcast, that anchored by the boogeyman Dan Rather, draws 50 percent more viewers on a bad night than "The O'Reilly Factor" does on a great one (the Bush interview).

Eventually you become a prisoner of your own fiction and lose touch with reality. You start making the mistakes Mr. Baker made - and more. The whole Bush-Cheney operation is less sure-footed about media manipulation than it once was. You could see this the week before the debate, when the president rolled out Mr. Allawi for a series of staged Washington appearances that were even less effective than his predecessor Ahmad Chalabi's State of the Union photo op with Laura Bush. No one at the White House seemed to realize that if you want to keep a puppet from being ridiculed as a puppet you don't put him on camera to deliver sound bites (some 16, by the calculation of Dana Milbank of The Washington Post) that are paraphrases of the president's much replayed golden oldies. The whole long charade played out like a lost reel of "Duck Soup."

...If anything, the first Bush-Kerry confrontation has given split-screen television a new vogue. Having defied the efforts of both campaigns to squelch its use on Sept. 30, emboldened TV news organizations can run with it at will. So we saw on the Sunday after that debate, when Condoleezza Rice appeared on ABC's "This Week."

There she was quizzed about the report in that morning's Times saying that in 2002 she had hyped aluminum tubes as evidence of Saddam's nuclear threat a year after her staff was told that government experts had serious doubts. Ms. Rice kept trying to talk over the soft-voiced George Stephanopoulos's questions, but he zapped her with a picture: a September 2002 CNN interview in which she had not, shall we say, told the whole truth and nothing but. As the old video played, ABC used a split screen so we could watch Ms. Rice, "This Is Your Life" style, as she watched the replay of her incriminating appearance of two years earlier. Maybe, like Mr. Bush at the first debate, she knew her reaction was being caught on camera. But even if she did, the unchecked rage in her face, like that of her boss three days earlier, revealed that her image and her story, like the war itself, had spun completely out of her control.

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Tom Friedman similarly ambushed Rumsfeld on camera. He was telling his usual incredible bold lies when Friedman quoted directly from a past Rumsfeld speech. I'm told Rumsfeld was filmed gasping for air.

By controlling the US media, by controlling the audiences they interact with, by controlling what they read, by speaking only to themselves, by consistently shooting the messengers, by their ruthless destruction of dissenters, Bush et al have created a hermetic fantasy world. It may yet work for them, but it will not work for our world.

It may be that the US media is waking up. One senior journalist tells me he feels the media was essentially asleep for the past two years, paralyzed by fears of the "liberal media" accusation, misled by false patriotism, trapped by conventions of "neutrality". He thinks those days are passing.

NPR : Secret Service Cleanses the Disloyal Voter

NPR : Morning Edition for Friday, October 8, 2004

An amazing story. We've known for some time that the Bush campaign has been allowing only the most loyal supporters to attend Bush rallies. Now we learn that the Secret Service has been the muscle for some of these screenings -- threatening anyone carrying Kerry paraphenelia with arrest and imprisonment as suspected terrorists.

Repeat. Some Secret Service agents consider anyone with less than full loyalty to George Bush to be a terrorist threat to America.

We are way past too far.

Bush and his remote control pod

Salon.com News | Bush's mystery bulge

Mystery-bulge bloggers argue that the president may have begun using such technology [remote teleprompt with intra-otic mike] earlier in his term. Because Bush is famously prone to malapropisms and reportedly dyslexic, which could make successful use of a teleprompter problematic, they say the president and his handlers may have turned to a technique often used by television reporters on remote stand-ups. A reporter tapes a story and, while on camera, plays it back into an earpiece, repeating lines just after hearing them, managing to sound spontaneous and error free.

Suggestions that Bush may have using this technique stem from a D-day event in France, when a CNN broadcast appeared to pick up -- and broadcast to surprised viewers -- the sound of another voice seemingly reading Bush his lines, after which Bush repeated them. Danny Schechter, who operates the news site MediaChannel.org, and who has been doing some investigating into the wired-Bush rumors himself, said the Bush campaign has been worried of late about others picking up their radio frequencies -- notably during the Republican Convention on the day of Bush's appearance. 'They had a frequency specialist stop me and ask about the frequency of my camera,' Schechter said. 'The Democrats weren't doing that at their convention.'

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Bush had some device strapped to his back during the debates. What was it?

Note that rumor has it that Bush has also deferred his October medical into November. (I've no substantiating evidence on this.) Given the bizarre behaviors and intrigues of this administration, the story almost writes itself. Cheney has been poisoning Bush for years, inducing an organic brain syndrome. After the election Bush-bot receives a "thorough" exam and his dementia is detected. He shuffles off to a nursing home. Cheney takes power. A mysterious dirty bomb causes great panic; Cheney declares martial law. Opponents disappear. Quietly, Bush passes on. A new world begins ...

You gotta admit, doesn't Cheney look like he could do something like that?

Anyway, if some journalist can figure a way to tap the frequencies used for teleprompt devices they might break a good story at the next debate.

Innovators work for free - historically

Marginal Revolution: The returns from innovation

The implication is that “society” pays a paltry $2.20 for every $100 worth of welfare it enjoys from innovating activities.

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This may change with recent abuses of patent and copyright -- innovators may capture more of the value. On the other hand, it is pretty clear we'll get less innovation from an era of protected intellectual property.

Bottom line, innovators innovate because they have to. It's a compulsion. Some people need to run, some people need to innovate.

Edwards and Cheney -- revealed

Boing Boing: Best VP debate parody image EVAR

The truth will come out.

Identification of the 1918 pandemic's lethality factor

The New York Times > Science > Critical Gene a Suspect in Lethal Epidemic

By recreating the influenza virus that killed up to 50 million people in 1918-19, researchers may have identified the gene that turned it into one of the most lethal in human history.

The gene, one of eight in the virus, seems to have an unexpected capacity for sending the body's immune system into overdrive, causing inflammation, hemorrhage and death, the scientists report today in the journal Nature.

... Dr. Kawaoka, Dr. Taubenberger and others have been reinserting the 1918-type genes into ordinary flu viruses to see if they can pinpoint which of the genes made the virus so lethal and how it did so. In the latest of these experiments, which Dr. Kawaoka reports today, a gene called the hemagglutinin or HA gene seems to be largely responsible for the dire effects of Spanish flu, as the 1918 epidemic is also known.

... The HA gene studied by Dr. Kawaoka's team is well known to flu experts because it changes from year to year. Since the protein made by the gene is the one singled out for attack by the immune system, the body's defenses are caught off guard each year as flu virus arrives with a novel version of the protein to which the body has no prior immunity.

... What he has now found is that the Spanish flu version of the HA gene, in addition to its break-in and enter role, seems able to trigger the release of cytokines, the signaling agents with which the immune system gears itself up for massive attack against an infectious agent.

Uncontrolled overdrive can make the immune system kill the body in order to save it, through excessive inflammation. The virus carrying the Spanish flu version of the HA gene produced high levels of cytokines in mice, Dr. Kawaoka says, and this is probably what led to the inflammation and lung damage that killed them.

... Survivors of the 1918 epidemic have high levels of antibody to the engineered virus, Dr. Kawaoka reports, but people infected recently with a similar class of flu virus do not. "Thus, a large section of the population would be susceptible to an outbreak of a 1918-like influenza virus," he and his colleagues concluded.

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If this is borne out by further work, Drs Kawaoka and Taubenberger may share the Nobel prize. Of course by the time they get their prize, high school students will have the facilities to create viruses that make this one seem relatively benign.

Today in central China a baby boy was born. Sixteen years from now he'll swear revenge on an unfaithful lover -- and in heartbroken spite he'll create the pathogen that saves the earth from humanity.

And some people think we should worry about al Qaeda.

Steroids increase head injury death rate by about 15%

Study: Steroids useless for head injury

The study, coordinated at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, involved 10,008 adults with severe head injuries who were randomly given either a steroid drip or a placebo for 48 hours after being admitted to the emergency room.

Within two weeks, 21 percent of the patients given steroids had died, compared with 18 percent of those given the placebo. The results were the same regardless of how quickly the treatment was given and regardless of the type or severity of the head injury.

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The steroids may or may not have helped with brain swelling, but they are toxic and dangerous drugs. The net effect appears to have been quite harmful.

Once again we see the limitations of retrospective studies. Only a large randomized trial was able to expose this problem. This is very reminescent of the estrogen replacement therapy crisis, though here the harm seems greater (ERT therapy was only slightly more harmful than no therapy).

I'm left with a bad feeling about the basis of a lot of interventions that have been shown in smaller or retrospective studies to improve mortality by 10-25%. A LOT of our medical and surgical interventions have benefits in that range. I think we need to consider them all to be highly suspect.

Author and intelligence specialist on Bush and the misuse and abuse of the CIA

Salon.com News | "A temporary coup"

...Powers, the author of "Intelligence Wars: American Secret History From Hitler to Al Qaeda," charges that the Bush administration is responsible for what is perhaps the greatest disaster in the history of U.S. intelligence. From failing to anticipate 9/11 to pressuring the CIA to produce bogus justifications for war, from abusing Iraqi prisoners to misrepresenting the nature of Iraqi insurgents, the Bush White House, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies they corrupted, coerced or ignored have made extraordinarily grave errors which could threaten our national security for years. By manipulating intelligence and punishing dissent while pursuing an extreme foreign-policy agenda, Bush leaders have set spy against U.S. spy and deeply damaged America's intelligence capabilities.

"It's a catastrophe beyond belief. Going into Afghanistan was inevitable, and in my opinion the right thing to do. But everything since then has been a horrible mistake," Powers says. "The CIA is politicized to an extreme. It's under the control of the White House. Tenet is leaving in the middle of an unresolved political crisis -- what really amounts to a constitutional crisis."

The bitterest dispute, though not the only one, is between the CIA and the Pentagon, whose own secret intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, aggressively promoted the war on Iraq. While departing CIA Director George Tenet played along with the Bush administration -- a fact which Powers says reveals the urgent need for a truly independent intelligence chief -- much of the agency is enraged at the Pentagon, which put intense pressure on it to produce reports tailored to the policy goals of the Bush White House. The simmering tensions between the Pentagon, with its troika of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith, and rank and file CIA personnel boiled over in July 2003, when the White House trashed the career of veteran CIA operative Valerie Plame by leaking her identity. The move was a crude retaliation against Plame's husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had exposed the Bush administration's specious claim that Saddam had sought "yellowcake" from Africa to build a nuclear bomb.

The struggle between the CIA and the Defense Department reached a bizarre climax a few weeks ago when Ahmed Chalabi's office was very publicly ransacked by officers working under the command of the CIA; the Iraqi exile leader was later accused of leaking vital information to Iran, among other allegations. The abrupt fall from grace of the man hand-picked by neoconservative policymakers to lead post-Saddam Iraq, says Powers, lays bare the brutal turf war between the two sides.

... Tenet was pushed out by the accumulating circumstances, not because he failed to do what Bush wanted him to do, which was essentially two things: The first was to not speak too clearly about the warnings that he'd given the White House before 9/11. You can be certain that it was not easy for Tenet to do that. Tenet has never spoken out clearly and said, "I told the president everything he needed to know to at least start responding to the threat."

... Secondly, Tenet hasn't spoken clearly on the reason why they got Iraqi WMD wrong. And it's not because people in the bowels of the agency had it all balled up, it's because in the process of writing finished intelligence -- which was required to extract a vote for war from congress -- it got turned on its head at the upper levels of the CIA. They found certainty where there wasn't any; the evidence for WMD stockpiles and programs was extremely thin. Who else could have created this situation besides the policymakers themselves?

... The agency is politicized to an extreme. It is under the control of the Bush White House. Tenet is leaving in the middle of an unresolved political crisis -- what really amounts to a constitutional crisis. It's somewhat like Iran-Contra, though on a totally different scale. The president wanted to go to war. He's supposed to have the support of the Congress. How did he get it? Well, his administration made up a scary story about imminent dangers.

... I think the truth about what happened at the policy level will eventually come out. We know, because it was on paper, that on Aug. 6, 2001 the CIA gave the president a very explicit warning. When 9/11 actually occurred, you would expect to look back and see, once the distress light was on, various U.S. intelligence and police organizations scurrying around frantically responding to the warning. But what do you find? Nothing.

It's a race

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

From the Wall Street Journal, today:
WSJ.com: The latest Zogby Interactive poll puts Mr. Kerry ahead of President Bush in 13 of the 16 closely contested states.... If the results on Election Day matched Zobgy's numbers, Mr. Kerry would win.... Mr. Kerry would have 322 electoral votes and the president would have 216.

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Ok, I'm guilty of figuring I was going to strive mightily and fall nobly in a hopeless cause. I didn't bank on actually having a chance of winning. Gee, kind of takes the fun out of hopelessness.

What went on in Iraq prior to the war - the WMD mystery

BBC NEWS | Middle East | A huge failure of intelligence

[The report of the Iraq Survey Group] ... came up with the theory that Saddam Hussein's dark mind was convinced that his power lay in his special weapons and that, even though he had to give them up after the first Gulf War in 1991, he was determined to preserve an ability to manufacture them.

At the same time, he wanted to maintain the myth of invincibility which the weapons had brought him. He always believed that it was the threat of the weapons which stopped the Americans from going to Baghdad in 1991. So he obscured what he had and did not have.

His priority was not to rebuild his weapons. That would have ensured the continuation of sanctions. It was to get rid of sanctions and to subvert them in the meantime.

He was prepared to wait his time until the outside world lost interest and left him alone.

This, and the system of fear and rewards he ran which was unfamiliar to the West, made his regime hard to read. He did not, as South Africa and Ukraine did, throw open his doors willingly and allow easy inspection. Indeed, the inspectors left at the end of 1998, so hard was their task.

Suspicion therefore remained and suspicion led to errors of judgement in which Saddam Hussein was not given the benefit of any doubt, even when the inspectors returned and found nothing.

It proved a disastrous strategy for Saddam Hussein because the uncertainty about his weapons could be exploited by an administration in Washington quite prepared to go to war.

It turns out that the only area in which a reasonably accurate assessment was made was in rocketry. Here, ironically, the threat was probably underplayed. Iraq had plans, according to the Survey Group, for a rocket with a range of 1,000km (620 miles), far in excess of the 150km (90 miles) he was permitted by the United Nations sanctions rules.

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This has been the emerging consensus for some time. The major question is whether Saddam thought he really had more current capabilities than was true. I think that's still an open question, though a relatively minor one.

The plausible charges against the Bush administration are three:

1. Did the Bush administration bias the pre-war intelligence, and avoid killing Zarqawi when they could have, to bolster their personal desires to destroy Saddam?

2. Was the Bush administrations desire to destroy Saddam rational?

3. Was the Bush administration delusional about what would happen after the invasion, or did Rumsfeld take horrible risks in order to preserve capacity for a second strike against Syria or Iran?

The current state of evidence on these charges suggests:

1. Likely guilty on both counts.
2. An open question. It may have been irrational, but a rational case could also have been made. The big argument is about method rather than goal. They are probably guilty of incompetence.
3. Guilty of incompetence.

The only rational judgement given the facts of the case:

Fire Bush.

Vote for Change resurrects Neil Young

MoveOn PAC

My wife and I attended our first mutual rock concert last night -- Bruce Springsteen, REM, John Fogarty ... and ... Neil Young. Young showed up at the Vote for Change concert unannounced. He looked near death during his first performance, but, incredibly, by the final ear crushing brain splintering finale he looked about 20 years younger. I thought the damned speakers would explode (which would have been at least quieter).

A very impressive group and a fun audience. Admittedly a very pale and aging audience. Springsteen is a great speaker (Governor Springsteen?). I still don't know who that REM guy is, but he has one heck of a magnetic personality.

My ears may never be the same again. Ouch.

Cheney says --- trust Factcheck.com on Halliburton

GeorgeSoros.com

This is truly hilarious. Good for George! Cheney misspoke during the debate, and named a .com domain rather than a .org. In the twinkling of an eye someone in Soros organization acquired the educational domain --- and pointed it here.

Update 10/10/04: Turns out the redirect was done by the owner of the factcheck.com domain without input from the Soros organization. Bravo for him! A hero of the resistance ...

The worst intelligence report in US history

The New York Times > International > Middle East > How the White House Used Disputed Arms Intelligence

This long article focuses on one part of what's been called "the worst report in the history of US intelligence" -- the pre-war Iraq intelligence estimate. The CIA and Dick Cheney both come out very badly. Colin Powell also does poorly. Now we know why Tenet quit.

George the Divine - coming soon to a DVD near you

IHT: Frank Rich: Bush's crusade for the White House

Rich comments on a DVD to be released October 5th. It tells the story of George Bush -- agent of God. Emphases mine.

... A towheaded child actor bathed in the golden light of an off-camera halo re-enacts the young George comforting his mom after the death of his sister; it's a parable anticipating the future president's miraculous ability to comfort us all after 9/11. As for the actual president, he is shown with a flag for a backdrop in a split-screen tableau with Jesus. The message isn't subtle: They were separated at birth.

... Anyone who stands in the way of Bush completing his godly battle, of course, is a heretic. Facts on the ground in Iraq don't matter. Rational arguments mustered in presidential debates don't matter. Logic of any kind is a nonstarter.

The president - who after 9/11 called the war on terrorism a "crusade," until protests forced the White House to backpedal - is divine. He may not hear "voices" instructing him on policy, testifies Stephen Mansfield, the author of one of the movie's source texts, "The Faith of George W. Bush," but he does act on "promptings" from God. "I think we went into Iraq not so much because there were weapons of mass destruction," Mansfield has explained elsewhere, "but because Bush had concluded that Saddam Hussein was an evildoer" in the battle "between good and evil." So why didn't we go into those other countries in the axis of evil, North Korea or Iran? Never mind. To ask such questions is to be against God and "with the terrorists."

Bush never admits to making a mistake; even his premature "Mission Accomplished" victory lap wasn't in error, as he recently told the con-servative talk-show host Bill O'Reilly. After all, if you believe "God wants me to be president" - a quote attributed to Bush by the Reverend Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention - it's a given that you are incapable of making mistakes.
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The president didn't revive the word "crusade" idly in the autumn of 2001. His view of faith is as a Manichaean scheme of blacks and whites to be acted out in a perpetual war against evil. The majority of Christian Americans may not agree with this apocalyptic worldview, but there's a big market for it. A Newsweek poll shows that 17 percent of Americans expect the world to end in their lifetime. To Karl Rove and company, that 17 percent is otherwise known as "the base."

... "George W. Bush: Faith in the White House" must be seen because it shows how someone like Boykin can stay in his job even in failure and why Bush feels divinely entitled to keep his job even as we stand on the cusp of an abyss in Iraq. In this pious but not humble worldview, faith, or at least a certain brand of it, counts more than competence, and a biblical mission, or at least a simplistic, blunderbuss facsimile of one, counts more than the secular goal of waging an effective, focused battle against an enemy as elusive and cunning as terrorists. That no one in this documentary, including its hero, acknowledges any constitutional boundaries between church and state is hardly a surprise. To them, America is a "Christian nation," period.

Far more startling is the inability of a president or his acolytes to acknowledge any boundary that might separate Bush's flawed actions battling "against the forces of evil" from the righteous dictates of God. What that level of hubris might bring in a second term is left to the imagination, and "Faith in the White House" gives the imagination room to run riot about what a 21st-century crusade might look like in the flesh

GBrowser, Google, Microsoft and Netscape Constellation

Could a 'GBrowser' Spawn an 'MBrowser'? - Mary Jo Foley (Microsoft Watch)

When Sun first fielded Java, it was 'just' a programming language. Then Sun expanded it into a 'platform' by adding other layers of software to the Java core.

It seems that Google is embarking on a similar path. In addition to providing a search engine, Google is now offering Web mail. It acquired photo-storing/sharing vendor Picassa. And in the not-too-distant future, Google could add a browser to its repertoire, as well....

Microsoft's focus on Google could become even sharper if rumors pan out regarding Google's intent to become a browser purveyor. The company has registered the 'Gbrowser.com,' 'Gbrowser.net' and 'Gbrowser.org' domain names. And if you piece the clues together, as some company watchers are doing, the Google browser won't be any old browser. It will be more of a development and operating environment, allowing users to work offline as well as online. Some might even go so far as to call it a 'platform.'

...My bet? While Opera, Safari and Firefox seemingly weren't enough to convince Microsoft that the company should find a way to swallow its antitrust arguments and release a new version of IE, Google's entrée into the market might be. I wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft release some kind of stripped-down browser (IE Lite, though they won't call it that) some time in the next year-plus.

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This is very familiar to anyone who remembers Netscape Constellation (1996, almost 10 years ago!). Constellation incited Microsoft to crush Netscape forever. Now the hand of Netscape is thrusting out of the grave. Microsoft will need to redouble their efforts to acquire or destroy Google.

Mary Jo Foley also notes that Microsoft has decided that it will fight hard to keep closed their networking communication protocols. In other words they have declared that the "lock-in" between their desktop and server solutions is critical to their business models.

Between Google and Linux Microsoft's paranoia must be working overtime. Of course a few billion dollars and an armada of lawsuits should suffice to defeat both of these enemies. (The only real concern is China. If China decided that it needed Linux as a matter of national security, that might be hard for Microsoft to overcome.)

Failure in the FBI and Homeland Security -- and another counter-terrorism head quits

The New York Times > Washington > Disarray Thwarts Terrorist List, Inquiry Finds

WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 - Efforts to create a master terrorist "watch list," a priority for the Bush administration, are lagging badly because of a lack of leadership at the Department of Homeland Security and other bureaucratic problems, the department's inspector general said in a report released Friday.

The highly critical report found that the effort, which seeks to combine 10 watch lists now in use by agencies across the federal government, suffers from poor coordination, staffing problems and technical hurdles. The problems reflect a "pattern of ad hoc approaches to counterterrorism" throughout the government, it said.

In a separate report issued on Monday, the Justice Department's inspector general faulted the Federal Bureau of Investigation for continuing problems in its ability to translate terrorism-related material, with a backlog of more than 120,000 hours of audio material. Computer storage problems may have also led the F.B.I. to systematically erase some recordings in investigating Al Qaeda, the department said.

... Mr. Ervin found in his report that the Homeland Security Department "has not fulfilled its leadership responsibility" for consolidating the watch lists, deferring instead to the Justice Department and the F.B.I. to take the lead in operating what is known as the Terrorist Screening Center, which was set up to consolidate the lists.

... Brian Rohrkasse, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said of the inspector general's criticisms, "We disagree with the premise of the report, which states that D.H.S. has the lead responsibility." He said that while homeland security was a "strong partner" in the project, the F.B.I. had the lead.

But an F.B.I. official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the dissension over the issue, said ultimate responsibility for developing a master watch list "is a D.H.S. function," adding: "We're doing it now because they didn't have a process to set it up, but it's a D.H.S. function. It's supposed to be D.H.S., and they should take a more active role."

... Domestic security officials told the inspector general that they "lacked the internal resources and infrastructure to carry out the effort" at a time when the department faced the "enormous task" of merging 22 agencies into a new Department of Homeland Security.

While the terrorist screening center was supposed to have 160 employees in place by this June, it had only about half that total because of management problems and difficulties finding people with the expertise and clearance levels, the report said. [jf: Given the practices of the Bush administration, the challenge may be finding Bush loyalists with any domain expertise.]

Nor has there been enough attention paid to ensuring that the watch lists do not impede on privacy rights, the report said. It found that some agencies using watch lists had conducted data mining operations without needed oversight, a practice that it said carried the "potential for greater civil liberties violations and law enforcement errors." [jf: They have no quality assurance on the list contents, no way to identify and correct errors, and no true restrictions on use and misuse. Maybe they should just outsource this list to the KGB.]

... Meanwhile, in another potential blow to the department, the head of the administration's efforts to make cyberspace more secure abruptly resigned on Thursday after a year on the job. The official, Amit Yoran, a former computer security entrepreneur, told department officials on Thursday that he was leaving his post as director of the National Cyber Security Division...

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Meanwhile Zawahiri makes the same declaration he made before the Madrid train bombs. No wonder the family members of the 9/11 commission have been campaigning for Kerry.

There are three stories here. None of them are likely to make it to Fox TV or the Wall Street Journal.

1. Homeland security is in disarray. My guess is that our security agencies need more of the "nerds and geeks" that they used to have in World War II, but who have since been expelled as too troublesome, disloyal, and insufficiently politic. The post-911 FBI evaluations also demonstrated a lot of incompetence in middle and upper management; with too many people who excel primarily at political infighting and survival.

Most of all, however, we've had a longstanding failure of leadership in the executive and legislative branches of government. Clinton was unable to tackle these problems because he was constantly under attack and investigation -- not a good position from which to reform the FBI!

Repairing homeland security will take honest, competent, and inspiring leadership from the executive and legislative branches, and the appointment of honest, ethical and empowered leaders in homeland security, the FBI, and the CIA. This in turn requires an informed and intelligent electorate to put that government in place. Hmm. I think I need to move my family to a remote part of British Columbia ...

2. The Watch List is broken. There's actually a good spin here. The Watch List was a really stupid idea; one widely ridiculed by most security experts. So perhaps competent people in both Homeland Security and the FBI decided it would be best to make it go away -- but they couldn't explain that to Bush (who doesn't understand this stuff). So they just ignored it. The best outcome would be for everyone to just forget about it. The worst outcome is that we'll simply use a broken watch list -- a kind of self-inflicted wound.

3. I wonder if Amit Yoran quit because of #1 and #2. Maybe he decided he needed to campaign for Kerry.


BTW. Does anyone else besides me think bin Laden is dead or missing? Zawahiri spoke as though bin Laden was gone.

The CIA and the White House -- an uneasy alliance

The New York Times > Washington > DOUGLAS JEHL > Intelligence: C.I.A.-White House Tensions Are Being Made Public to Rare Degree

I recently heard a US Senator claim that the Senate receives better briefings from Slate and the New York Times than they get from the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency. I'd always had the naive idea that the Senate was an important part of the US government. I guess I was reading the wrong constitution.

In the meantime the CIA and the White House are barely talking to one another. Our President evidently receives his intelligence from a supernatural source. Given the results to date, I suspect the president's unwordly advisor does not mean us well.

I can only wonder how bad things will be after four more years of Bush. Here's the CIA/White House story:

October 2, 2004

... James L. Pavitt spent 31 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, the last five as head of the clandestine service, before retiring in August. But never, Mr. Pavitt said Friday, does he recall anything like "the viciousness and vindictiveness" now playing out in a battle between the White House and the C.I.A.

... Already, the contents of classified intelligence estimates about Iraq have been leaked by people sympathetic to the C.I.A., to the considerable embarrassment of the White House...

... In a telephone conversation on Friday, Mr. Pavitt made an argument that echoed that others have sounded in recent weeks. "There was nothing in the intelligence that was a casus belli," Mr. Pavitt said. The C.I.A. may have been wrong about Iraq and its weapons, he acknowledged, but it was on the mark in issuing prewar warnings about the obstacles that an American occupying force would face in postwar Iraq.

Mr. Pavitt's career whose spanned the Church Committee revelations, in the mid-1970s, of C.I.A. improprieties, the sharp downsizing of the C.I.A. under President Jimmy Carter, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the repeated intelligence failures of recent years, including those related to the Sept. 11 attacks.

As deputy director of operations, Mr. Pavitt headed human spying operations, and was the day-to-day tactical commander of the clandestine war on terrorism. He worked closely with the White House, and said he has no sympathy with those in the government who may have leaked the contents of classified documents to make a political point. "The agency is not out to undermine this president," Mr. Pavitt said.

,,, But Mr. Pavitt was not alone among former intelligence officials in describing what is now unfolding as extraordinary. In interviews, several other former high-ranking officials, including those from the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies, said that while C.I.A. and White House were continuing to work closely and professionally together, they had rarely seen tensions so high among their allies and other partisans on both sides.

... Whatever the motivation, the steps taken by people sympathetic to the C.I.A. allies to call attention to intelligence successes on Iraq have been notable. They included the disclosure in mid-September by government officials to The New York Times of details of a classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared for President Bush in July 2004 and distributed in late August. Its gloomy assessment of the challenges facing Iraq said that an environment of tenuous stability was the best-case outcome the country could expect through the end of 2005.

Other disclosures by government officials early this week have included specific new details contained in two other classified documents, prewar assessments on Iraq that were issued by the National Intelligence Council in January 2003... The intelligence warnings appeared to have been much sharper than was acknowledged in the more upbeat forecasts provided before the war by Mr. Bush and top deputies including Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary.

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Is an agents primary responsibility to the government or to the nation? What if they know the president is incompetent and leading the nation into disaster? I don't know the answer. I'm sure I don't trust the Wall Street Journal however.