The False Promises of a Draft - Why conscription won't improve the military. By Fred Kaplan
Kaplan doesn't really argue whether a draft is right or wrong -- he argues that it's impractical and counterproductive. He makes a strong case, though he chooses his arguments carefully. We've got the material for a very good debate now.
Kaplan's position is that we should pay more to recruit our warriors -- possibly a LOT more. I gather he's talking about sizeable tax increases.
Either a draft or a big tax increase. Sounds like the choices are well defined.
Sunday, June 27, 2004
Tim O'Reilly on open source, economics, and the future of software
tim.oreilly.com -- Various Things I've Written: Tim's Archive
A longish and complex talk, with a large helping of Net history. Tim needs to turn it over to one of his editors before it goes to print -- or, more likely, turn it into a book. For the moment, however, it's well worth the thinking work.
A longish and complex talk, with a large helping of Net history. Tim needs to turn it over to one of his editors before it goes to print -- or, more likely, turn it into a book. For the moment, however, it's well worth the thinking work.
Friday, June 25, 2004
Google Gags the Left, but not the Right
Perrspectives: Articles: Google's Gag Order
Here's what I wrote Google's media contact:
Read this page:
http://www.perrspectives.com/articles/art_gagorder01.htm
This is a big deal. If Google is censoring liberal/left web sites targeted by right wing loons, but leaving far nastier right wing sites untouched, then Google is going to face a firestorm.
Time for me to uninstall the Google toolbar and try Vivisimo's instead.
Here's what I wrote Google's media contact:
Read this page:
http://www.perrspectives.com/articles/art_gagorder01.htm
This is a big deal. If Google is censoring liberal/left web sites targeted by right wing loons, but leaving far nastier right wing sites untouched, then Google is going to face a firestorm.
Time for me to uninstall the Google toolbar and try Vivisimo's instead.
Gore Attacks from the left: Democracy itself is in grave danger
Salon.com | "Democracy itself is in grave danger"
There's been a trend in the Bush reign towards the idea that a war-time president is above the law, indeed, is the law. I wonder if Gore fears that Bush will stage something in October ...
Gore studies history. He knows democracy is not a certainty. Full democracy is only about 34 years old in the US. He's worried that we may lose our soul in the way we respond to terrorism.
I'd expect al Qaeda to launch an October attack with a chemical or radioactive weapon, with the intent to keep GWB in power. If they do, look for GWB to declare martial law ...
Even though we are now attuned to orange alerts and the potential for terrorist attacks, our founders would almost certainly caution us that the biggest threat to the future of the America we love is still the endemic challenge that democracies have always faced whenever they have appeared in history -- a challenge rooted in the inherent difficulty of self-governance and the vulnerability to fear that is part of human nature. Again, specifically, the biggest threat to America is that we Americans will acquiesce in the slow and steady accumulation of too much power in the hands of one person.
Having painstakingly created the intricate design of America, our founders knew intimately both its strengths and weaknesses, and during their debates they not only identified the accumulation of power in the hands of the executive as the long-term threat which they considered to be the most serious, but they also worried aloud about one specific scenario in which this threat might become particularly potent -- that is, when war transformed America's president into our commander in chief, they worried that his suddenly increased power might somehow spill over its normal constitutional boundaries and upset the delicate checks and balances they deemed so crucial to the maintenance of liberty.
There's been a trend in the Bush reign towards the idea that a war-time president is above the law, indeed, is the law. I wonder if Gore fears that Bush will stage something in October ...
Gore studies history. He knows democracy is not a certainty. Full democracy is only about 34 years old in the US. He's worried that we may lose our soul in the way we respond to terrorism.
I'd expect al Qaeda to launch an October attack with a chemical or radioactive weapon, with the intent to keep GWB in power. If they do, look for GWB to declare martial law ...
Bill Clinton, oh how we miss you ...
Salon.com News | The Salon Interview: Bill Clinton
I felt like crying reading Clinton's interview. We need him so badly now.
The good news is that he's fit, sharp, and ready to fight hard.
With Clinton right and center, and Gore covering his left flank with raking fire, Kerry might just win.
One thing you can be sure of, no-one will talk about gun control. The NRA has won a decade's respite.
.... If you're not going to have an employer mandate, then probably the only way to do it is some version of what Rep. Rahm Emanuel [D-Ill.] is now suggesting -- which is to allow all the uninsured people to buy into the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program. That's a private plan with a lot of different options and costs. And then subsidize the purchases for small businesses and those who can't afford it. That's the simplest way to do it, with low administrative costs.
I felt like crying reading Clinton's interview. We need him so badly now.
The good news is that he's fit, sharp, and ready to fight hard.
With Clinton right and center, and Gore covering his left flank with raking fire, Kerry might just win.
One thing you can be sure of, no-one will talk about gun control. The NRA has won a decade's respite.
Bush 2004 achievements
washingtonpost.com: Bush Remains Afloat Despite Bad News
My list would include some of these things, others were only tangentially the result of GWB's incompetence.
- Bush delivers a State of the Union address, with his opposition to performance-enhancing drugs in sports standing out against a bleak roster of new policies.
- Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill writes a book claiming Bush was determined from the get-go to overthrow Iraq's Saddam Hussein.
- The president's shaky performance on NBC's "Meet the Press" fuels anxiety among GOP allies about Iraq and the fledgling re-election campaign.
- Richard Clarke, the top counterterrorism official for Presidents Clinton and Bush, undercuts the president's tough-on-terrorism claims during congressional testimony.
- National security adviser Condoleezza Rice at first refuses to testify before Congress about the Sept. 11 attacks, then bows to pressure.
- Bush's economic adviser, N. Gregory Mankiw, says the transfer of U.S. jobs overseas is sometimes a good thing.
- Bush scuttles plans to name Anthony Raimondo as manufacturing czar after Democrats point out that the businessman's company laid off 75 workers in 2002 while announcing the construction a $3 million plant in China.
- The death toll in Iraq mounts through the spring as Republican governors, busy attending funerals of slain servicemen and shipping National Guard troops overseas, warn the White House that voters are getting antsy.
- Four U.S. contractors are killed and mutilated near Baghdad.
- Train bombers strike Madrid. Voters throw the Bush-backing Spanish government out of power. Spain later withdraws its troops from Iraq.
- Vice President Dick Cheney comes under fire for past business ties, secretive deliberations on energy policy and unsubstantiated suggestions that his office might be behind the leak of a CIA operative's name.
- U.S. weapons inspector David Kay concludes that Iraq did not have stockpiles of forbidden weapons, undercutting Bush's main justification for war.
- Democrats unite behind Kerry after a short nomination fight, allowing him to raise record amounts of money and turn quickly against Bush.
- Democratic lawmakers call for an investigation into whether the Bush administration's Medicare chief pressured a subordinate to withhold estimates of the cost of last year's Medicare legislation.
- Clarke follows his testimony with a book claiming Bush was so preoccupied with Iraq both before and after the Sept. 11 attacks that he failed to effectively confront threats from al-Qaida.
- Gas prices top $2 per gallon.
- Revelations that U.S. soldiers abused prisoners in Iraq fuel anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world and raise questions at home about U.S. moral authority in Iraq.
- Militants linked to al-Qaida behead American Nicholas Berg.
- The leader of Iraqi's governing council is assassinated.
- A memo reveals plans for the Bush administration to slash domestic programs after the Nov. 2 presidential election.
- Al-Qaida militants in Saudi Arabia behead American helicopter technician Paul M. Johnson Jr.
- Militants in Iraq behead South Korean Kim Sun-il.
- Insurgents launched coordinated attacks that kills more than 100 people, including three U.S. soldiers.
My list would include some of these things, others were only tangentially the result of GWB's incompetence.
The Bush Terror Report: feeding the ignorant masses
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Errors on Terror
One of the key memes Strauss taught the Neo-Cons was that the masses were ill-suited to the truth. Better to tell them what will best serve their true interests, interests that only their betters can know.
This meme runs deep in the Bush Administration. They communicate stories to reassure the masses, while preserving "truth" for those (all loyalists) best able to handle it.
Al Gore would say this isn't very democratic. He'd be right.
Among other things, the center took over the job of preparing the government's annual report on "Patterns of Global Terrorism." The latest report, released in April, claimed to document a sharp fall in terrorism. "You will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight," Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage declared. But this week the government admitted making major errors. In fact, in 2003 the number of significant terrorist attacks reached a 20-year peak.
How could they get it so wrong? The answer tells you a lot about the state of the "war on terror."
Credit for uncovering the report's errors goes to Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist, and David Laitin, a Stanford political scientist, who are studying patterns of terrorism. Mr. Krueger tells me that as soon as they looked at the latest report, they knew something was wrong.
All of the supposed decline in terrorism, they quickly saw, resulted from a fall in the number of "nonsignificant" events, which Mr. Krueger and Mr. Laitin say "are counted with a squishy definition." Even the original report showed significant attacks — a much less squishy category — rising to a 20-year high. And the list of significant attacks ended on Nov. 11, 2003, but there were several major terrorist incidents after that date. Sure enough, including these and other omitted attacks more than doubled the estimated 2003 death toll...
... Mr. Krueger, a forgiving soul, believes that the report was botched through simple incompetence. Maybe — though we can be sure that if the statistics had told the administration something it didn't want to hear, they would have been carefully checked. By the way, while the report's tables and charts have been fixed, the revised summary still gives little hint of how bad the data really are.
One of the key memes Strauss taught the Neo-Cons was that the masses were ill-suited to the truth. Better to tell them what will best serve their true interests, interests that only their betters can know.
This meme runs deep in the Bush Administration. They communicate stories to reassure the masses, while preserving "truth" for those (all loyalists) best able to handle it.
Al Gore would say this isn't very democratic. He'd be right.
Monday, June 21, 2004
The New York Times > Washington > U.S. Said to Overstate Value of Guantanamo Detainees
The New York Times > Washington > U.S. Said to Overstate Value of Guantanamo Detainees
A long article, well paired with a WaPo article on the failure of the mission in Iraq. The article is circumspect, but it becomes clear that we've had a plague of deception, some of it self-deception, much of it straightforward lying.
Now when Ashcroft yells "wolf", no-one who matters believes him. Problem is, there really is a wolf.
We need a new government.
... But as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on the legal status of the 595 men imprisoned here, an examination by The New York Times has found that government and military officials have repeatedly exaggerated both the danger the detainees posed and the intelligence they have provided.
A long article, well paired with a WaPo article on the failure of the mission in Iraq. The article is circumspect, but it becomes clear that we've had a plague of deception, some of it self-deception, much of it straightforward lying.
Now when Ashcroft yells "wolf", no-one who matters believes him. Problem is, there really is a wolf.
We need a new government.
Why Bush failed in Iraq: Loyalty first
Mistakes Loom Large as Handover Nears (washingtonpost.com)
This is the core of GWB's failings. He values loyalty to his cause above all else. The CPA was staffed by very bright and energetic people -- but their primary requirement was loyalty.
Wrong choice.
On the eve of its dissolution, the CPA has become a symbol of American failure in the eyes of most Iraqis. In a recent poll sponsored by the U.S. government, 85 percent of respondents said they lacked confidence in the CPA. The criticism is echoed by some Americans working in the occupation. They fault CPA staffers who were fervent backers of the invasion and of the Bush administration, but who lacked reconstruction skills and Middle East experience. Only a handful spoke Arabic.
This is the core of GWB's failings. He values loyalty to his cause above all else. The CPA was staffed by very bright and energetic people -- but their primary requirement was loyalty.
Wrong choice.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Private craft makes space history
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Private craft makes space history
I never thought they'd be able to pull it off. This craft is going to the Air and Space Museum and the team is going down in history.
SpaceShipOne has rocketed into the history books to become the first private manned spacecraft to fly to the edge of space and back.
The craft, built by aviation pioneer Burt Rutan, went over space's 100km (62 mile) boundary, said mission control.
I never thought they'd be able to pull it off. This craft is going to the Air and Space Museum and the team is going down in history.
Saturday, June 19, 2004
Bin Laden will seek to keep Bush in power -- probably win a pre-November attack
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Bush told he is playing into Bin Laden's hands
Or 100,000.
This is one more in a series of continuing cries of desperation from the apolotical bureaucrats who keep the country running irregardless of the party in power. They cry out only in conditions of great desperation and extraordinary governmental incompetency.
This is one of those times.
Every American must call out as loudly as they can. We have to do everything possible to assemble competent leadership. The danger has been growing with every year; Bush is bin Laden's greatest ally.
Bush told he is playing into Bin Laden's hands
Al-Qaida may 'reward' American president with strike aimed at keeping him in office, senior intelligence man says
Julian Borger in Washington
Saturday June 19, 2004
The Guardian
A senior US intelligence official is about to publish a bitter condemnation of America's counter-terrorism policy, arguing that the west is losing the war against al-Qaida and that an "avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked" war in Iraq has played into Osama bin Laden's hands.
Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror due out next month, dismisses two of the most frequent boasts of the Bush administration: that Bin Laden and al-Qaida are "on the run" and that the Iraq invasion has made America safer.
In an interview with the Guardian the official, who writes as "Anonymous", described al-Qaida as a much more proficient and focused organisation than it was in 2001, and predicted that it would "inevitably" acquire weapons of mass destruction and try to use them.
He said Bin Laden was probably "comfortable" commanding his organisation from the mountainous tribal lands along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The Pakistani army claimed a big success in the "war against terror" yesterday with the killing of a tribal leader, Nek Mohammed, who was one of al-Qaida's protectors in Waziristan.
But Anonymous, who has been centrally involved in the hunt for Bin Laden, said: "Nek Mohammed is one guy in one small area. We sometimes forget how big the tribal areas are." He believes President Pervez Musharraf cannot advance much further into the tribal areas without endangering his rule by provoking a Pashtun revolt. "He walks a very fine line," he said yesterday.
Imperial Hubris is the latest in a relentless stream of books attacking the administration in election year. Most of the earlier ones, however, were written by embittered former officials. This one is unprecedented in being the work of a serving official with nearly 20 years experience in counter-terrorism who is still part of the intelligence establishment.
The fact that he has been allowed to publish, albeit anonymously and without naming which agency he works for, may reflect the increasing frustration of senior intelligence officials at the course the administration has taken.
Anonymous does not try to veil his contempt for the Bush White House and its policies. His book describes the Iraq invasion as "an avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat but whose defeat did offer economic advantage.
"Our choice of timing, moreover, shows an abject, even wilful failure to recognise the ideological power, lethality and growth potential of the threat personified by Bin Laden, as well as the impetus that threat has been given by the US-led invasion and occupation of Muslim Iraq."
In his view, the US missed its biggest chance to capture the al-Qaida leader at Tora Bora in the Afghan mountains in December 2001. Instead of sending large numbers of his own troops, General Tommy Franks relied on surrogates who proved to be unreliable.
"For my money, the game was over at Tora Bora," Anonymous said.
Yesterday President Bush repeated his assertion that Bin Laden was cornered and that there was "no hole or cave deep enough to hide from American justice".
Anonymous said: "I think we overestimate significantly the stress [Bin Laden's] under. Our media and sometimes our policymakers suggest he's hiding from rock to rock and hill to hill and cave to cave. My own hunch is that he's fairly comfortable where he is."
The death and arrest of experienced operatives might have set back Bin Laden's plans to some degree but when it came to his long-term capacity to threaten the US, he said, "I don't think we've laid a glove on him".
"What I think we're seeing in al-Qaida is a change of generation," he said."The people who are leading al-Qaida now seem a lot more professional group.
"They are more bureaucratic, more management competent, certainly more literate. Certainly, this generation is more computer literate, more comfortable with the tools of modernity. I also think they're much less prone to being the Errol Flynns of al-Qaida. They're just much more careful across the board in the way they operate."
As for weapons of mass destruction, he thinks that if al-Qaida does not have them already, it will inevitably acquire them.
The most likely source of a nuclear device would be the former Soviet Union, he believes. Dirty bombs, chemical and biological weapons, could be home-made by al-Qaida's own experts, many of them trained in the US and Britain.
Anonymous, who published an analysis of al-Qaida last year called Through Our Enemies' Eyes, thinks it quite possible that another devastating strike against the US could come during the election campaign, not with the intention of changing the administration, as was the case in the Madrid bombing, but of keeping the same one in place.
"I'm very sure they can't have a better administration for them than the one they have now," he said.
"One way to keep the Republicans in power is to mount an attack that would rally the country around the president."
The White House has yet to comment publicly on Imperial Hubris, which is due to be published on July 4, but intelligence experts say it may try to portray him as a professionally embittered maverick.
The tone of Imperial Hubris is certainly angry and urgent, and the stridency of his warnings about al-Qaida led him to be moved from a highly sensitive job in the late 90s.
But Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of operations at the CIA counter-terrorism centre, said he had been vindicated by events. "He is very well respected, and looked on as a serious student of the subject."
Anonymous believes Mr Bush is taking the US in exactly the direction Bin Laden wants, towards all-out confrontation with Islam under the banner of spreading democracy.
He said: "It's going to take 10,000-15,000 dead Americans before we say to ourselves: 'What is going on'?
Or 100,000.
This is one more in a series of continuing cries of desperation from the apolotical bureaucrats who keep the country running irregardless of the party in power. They cry out only in conditions of great desperation and extraordinary governmental incompetency.
This is one of those times.
Every American must call out as loudly as they can. We have to do everything possible to assemble competent leadership. The danger has been growing with every year; Bush is bin Laden's greatest ally.
The Financial Times gives up on GWB
FT.com | Search | Article
One of the interesting aspects of the 9/11 report was that Usama believed a successful strike would help al Qaeda recruit members and facilitate his desire to take control of Saudi Arabia.
So far, he looks prescient. I don't think he's so smart, the problem is we're pretty stupid.
So now the FT has given up on GWB. Next the Economist? But not the WSJ.
Whether the Osama and Saddam thesis was more the result of self-delusion or cynical manipulation, it - along with Washington's mismanagement of the whole Iraqi adventure - has been enormously damaging.
The Bush administration has misled the American people. It has isolated the US, as American diplomats and commanders pointed out this week. And its bungling in Iraq has given new and terrifying life to the cult of death sponsored by Osama bin Laden. Above all, it inspires little confidence it is capable of defeating the spreading al-Qaeda franchise, which always was the clear and present danger.
One of the interesting aspects of the 9/11 report was that Usama believed a successful strike would help al Qaeda recruit members and facilitate his desire to take control of Saudi Arabia.
So far, he looks prescient. I don't think he's so smart, the problem is we're pretty stupid.
So now the FT has given up on GWB. Next the Economist? But not the WSJ.
Friday, June 18, 2004
The deal Bush made -- with the devil
Salon.com | Torture's dark allure
Primeval. The experience of being an unassailable alpha.
This story is George Bush's gift to America.
The New York Times had an excellent piece related to the 9/11 commission. They pointed out that most of the story the 9/11 commission related was the result of torturing two or three high level al Qaeda operatives. The real experts in intelligence are very skeptical about these stories. Ironically Bush evidently doesn't believe the 9/11 report -- even though the "confessions" are the product of policies his administration approved and advanced. He sold his soul to the devil, and he rightly distrusts the answers he's getting.
Goethe would have appreciated this.
Few things give a rush quite like having unlimited power over another human being. A sure sign the rush is coming is pasty saliva and a strange taste in one's mouth, according to a French soldier attached to a torture unit in Algeria. That powerful rush can be seen on the faces of some of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib, a rush that undoubtedly changed them forever.
Primeval. The experience of being an unassailable alpha.
This story is George Bush's gift to America.
The New York Times had an excellent piece related to the 9/11 commission. They pointed out that most of the story the 9/11 commission related was the result of torturing two or three high level al Qaeda operatives. The real experts in intelligence are very skeptical about these stories. Ironically Bush evidently doesn't believe the 9/11 report -- even though the "confessions" are the product of policies his administration approved and advanced. He sold his soul to the devil, and he rightly distrusts the answers he's getting.
Goethe would have appreciated this.
The ancestry of Word -- there is no new software ...
DigiBarn: Re-visiting and revising the famous Bushy Tree diagram of the lineage of visual computing systems
Is there really any new software? Obviously there must be, but it's quite rare. All of the commercial and vertical market s/w I know of has strong roots in very old systems. Word's roots go back 22 years. It was a pretty decent application until about 1995/1997 -- not the best, but tolerable. After 1997 a bad design decision mixed up the original Styles model with a different inline formatting model. Since then Word has been fundamentally broken. (Not that most people care or notice.)
Lots of lessons here, including what happens to software when it diverts from the vision of its designers.
Charles Simonyi and most of the BravoX team left Xerox for Microsoft as a group, around about 1982 or 1983. The first version of MS Word, which appeared maybe a year later, was essentially just a port of BravoX to MS-DOS. If you read the BravoX manual, you can see that it already has MS Word features such as Styles. MS Word also shows its ancestry in its native file format. Bravo and BravoX stored out files by essentially just dumping the memory heap. This made saving and loading documents very fast, but it also meant that a) the file format was not at all easy to decode, and b) some strange stuff, such as previously deleted text, is stored out along with live text. These idiosyncrasies of the file format are still present in the current version of MS Word.
Is there really any new software? Obviously there must be, but it's quite rare. All of the commercial and vertical market s/w I know of has strong roots in very old systems. Word's roots go back 22 years. It was a pretty decent application until about 1995/1997 -- not the best, but tolerable. After 1997 a bad design decision mixed up the original Styles model with a different inline formatting model. Since then Word has been fundamentally broken. (Not that most people care or notice.)
Lots of lessons here, including what happens to software when it diverts from the vision of its designers.
June 19th - celebrating the end of institutional American slavery
The New York Times > National > An Obscure Texas Celebration Makes Its Way Across the U.S.
A national holiday celebrating the end of slavery is way overdue. Maybe it would be the first step in America facing its history. National aboriginal genocide day is still in the future.
With events including a small rap contest in Anchorage and a huge festival of African-American heritage in Baltimore, hundreds of thousands of Americans will celebrate Juneteenth, the day slavery in the United States effectively ended. With the arrival of an Army ship in Galveston on June 19, 1865, Texas was the last state to learn that the South had surrendered two months earlier. More than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, the 250,000 slaves in Texas were finally freed.
A national holiday celebrating the end of slavery is way overdue. Maybe it would be the first step in America facing its history. National aboriginal genocide day is still in the future.
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